Chalk
by Honeybeemeadows
Summary: Bella needs a new hobby. Will a new pair of ugly shoes, a shirtless guy and a bag full of chalk give her any relief from the boredom? Rated for various tensions, lemons and boys on rocks. I own nothing, not even a crash pad.
1. Chapter 1

**Chalk:1**

"You're gonna go out and climb _rocks_?"

Alice was staring at me as though I'd just turned into a ten year old boy in front of her very eyes. I nodded at her, trying to make myself look sure of it.

"Rocks," she said again, her voice stained in disbelief.

"Well, _yeah_, when you say it _that way..._ it sounds stupid." I sighed and flopped onto the couch, shopping bag discarded at my feet. The high I'd gotten from the adrenaline buzz that the new spark of interest gave me was fading fast and I was starting to see this entire thing as it must seem to Alice. _Ridiculous_. I wasn't the athletic type, _at all_, and would much rather lay out in the yard in the sun with a book, glass of wine and a big floppy hat than climb a mountain. I didn't like to get too cold or wet, or even too hot or dry. Didn't like thorns or bugs or mud. Did my best to avoid anything even remotely dangerous.

Which basically meant that I fucking _loved_ my little house with its shady garden and yard overrun in violets.

Don't ask what possessed me to prance into an outdoor gear store and buy myself a pair of shoes for a 'sport' that I had absolutely no experience in. It might have had something to do with the picture of the muscled, sweating boy hanging from his fingertips on the big blown up poster outside the store. Might have been the way the air smelled that day, or the restless feeling that had settled heavy in my ribcage. I was feeling bored and had been flailing around aimlessly for months, looking for something new to occupy myself with. While I'd come up with any number of colorful ideas, I hadn't acted on any of them, too afraid of becoming my mother who picked up and dropped hobbies like hot coals.

Until now.

"For fun?" Alice pressed, still not believing a word I said. Her idea of 'fun' was going to a wine bar, ordering a cheese platter and drinking herself silly enough to believe she was in Paris. She wore what amounted to adult-tutus and was regularly sprinkled in a fine shimmer of sparkly makeup. She'd spend an hour talking you through an art gallery and another hour dragging you through a thrift store. Her absolute favorite activity in the whole entire world was annoying the shit out of me, and since our duplexes shared a fence which was really only a low unruly tangle of sweet peas, she was able to indulge herself often.

"For _exercise_. And yeah, for fun I guess." I retorted, grumbling a little because I really had no idea what I was in for.

Alice sat next to me and pulled the shoe box from the plastic bag, rustling through the tissue paper and gasping.

"Those are the ugliest damn shoes I've ever seen." She scoffed, picking one out of the tissue paper and examining it as though it was an alien insect, held in the tips of her fingers in case it stung. Coming from her, this was the understatement of the century, considering the sky high heels she was sporting that like looked sort of like mid-evil torture devices.

"The guy at the store says they're the best." I eyed the insect-alien, trying to find some beauty in it, but she was right. It _was_ ugly. Curved in on itself like some weird chrysalis and I couldn't actually believe that the guy wanted me to fit my whole foot in there at first. _Christ_, it was like a child's toy. He assured me that they were meant to cut off your circulation like that and it would make a whole lot more sense once I was actually out there on a rock.

He looked a little worried for me, but I ignored him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chalk:2**

There was an open space just outside of town known for it's '_bouldering_.' Apparently, this is what I'm doing. Bouldering. Which right now is really only hiking my ass up a steep trail with the sun burning my neck, a backpack that was far heavier than it should be and I was already starting to sweat. Alice snickered at me as we shared a cup of coffee over the sweet peas this morning. She still couldn't believe I was going to go through with it.

I kind of couldn't believe it either.

I struggled up the last of the hill, breaking onto the edge of an open meadow, brown wavy grass as tall as my waist creeping toward a section of trees a little ways off. There was a sheer cliff far above the tree tops, a towering fortress of stone that was slowly crumbling away, shedding pieces of itself to the forest floor once every other millennia. A few of these monster chunks of rock had made their way clear to the meadow, lodging themselves deep into the soft dirt like upended houses, growing lichen and moss and heat. There were probably more buried in those trees, the ones that hadn't rolled clear through the wooden barrier and I really hoped I wouldn't be around to witness the next chunk fall, however slight the probability.

With my luck, I would totally be crushed.

I didn't really know what I was looking for and crept through the meadow of rocks almost on my tiptoes, feeling nervous and and foreign and tiny among them. I followed the trail, keeping my eyes peeled as it meandered into the trees. It was pretty here, if anything, cool and green under shelter, early spring giving everything a lush emerald glow. The trail I was following began to sprout as I entered the trees and I took a deep breath before I picked one of my three options, heading farther along the trail, parallel to the cliff.

I began to spot the signs of other people's climbing, patches of white on the smoothed edges of rock. Connect-the-dots constellations scattered up the sides of giant boulders, the ground below them worn smooth from millions of feet.

I continued down the path for some ways, getting a little lost in how pretty it was out here and had even picked an interesting looking flower that I'd never seen before, something deep blue and sprouting jagged petals. I tucked it behind my ear and rounded a tree just in time to see a shirtless guy, all muscles and muscles and _more_ muscles, hauling himself up the final stretch of a freaking _gigantic_ rock, dangling at least ten feet off the ground. He strained up over the lip of the rock and hopped to his feet, sort of howling like a wild animal in joy or pain, or maybe some combination of both. Another guy standing at the base of the rock joined in his yelling and I peered around the tree to watch them celebrate, fingers sunken into the bark.

The tree smelled like butterscotch, I shit you not, baking in the sun. I started to panic about the fact that I was hiding behind a tree not ten feet away and it was only a matter of time before one of them was bound to notice me.

The guy on the rock disappeared over the opposite side and was suddenly standing at the base faster than I thought possible, his friend holding a hand in the air for a high five that clapped together in a powdery puff of white. They stood with their backs to me, examining the rock and pointing spots of white out to each other, making all sorts of weird hand gestures between them. While shirtless guy was lithe and lean with flaming burnished hair, the other guy was gigantic, dark headed, and had a shirt on. It didn't take long before the giant guy was setting up at the base of the rock, readying his fingers and lifting his feet off the ground.

_Now_.

I ducked my head and stepped slowly out from behind the tree, moving at a deliberate pace and hoping not to catch too much attention. The giant guy was hanging off the rock, focused intently on his fingers and didn't notice me. The other guy, however, totally did and I scampered past with a timid wave and darted into the trees.

I'm pretty sure he watched me the entire time.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chalk:3**

I went as far as the path would take me, wanting to be as alone as possible for the first attempt at something I was sure to have no talent in. I certainly didn't want anyone to witness my uncertainty and found a nice-sized rock in a secluded glade of trees, the forest quiet around me. It wasn't nearly as big as the rock those guys had been climbing, but I was a lot smaller than them and it still looked enormous above me. I dropped my backpack and settled beside it, struggling into my shoes with more than a few muttered expletives. I swear these were made for someone half my age, my toes all scrunched up in the pointed front.

The guy at the outdoor store had sold me a plastic bag of chalk, even though it looked more like some illegal drug substance if you asked me, and a little flowered pouch to keep it in. I knew that climbers used chalk to keep their hands dry and had even seen the evidence of that on the way, but I had no idea exactly how to use it. I dumped some of the contents of the plastic bag into the little pouch and dunked my hands inside, coating them in white and looking like a damn junkie.

When I stood and clapped them together, I let off the same powdery puff of white into the air.

It took me more than a moment to work up the courage to actually do what I'd come out here to do. I stood there on trembling legs, wringing my hands for a while before I told myself to get a grip and put my hand to the rock. It was warm, almost pulsing with heat and I drew my hand back in surprise, thinking for a moment that the rock had actually been breathing. That it might be alive and I'd accidentally awake some forest creature-hybrid that was mythically large and could eat me in one bite.

The rock didn't move.

I tried again, still a little shocked at the heat under my palm. I found one of the white patches and slipped my fingers into it, just above my head. The rock was grainy, rough under my fingertips and I could almost feel the hand prints left behind by others. I found another hand hold and then one for my foot. As soon as I lifted my second foot off the ground, my fingers dug reflexively into the rock, the instinctual fear that I was going to fall holding me firmly in place. I took a deep gulping breath and readjusted my foot-hold, peering down the small space between the rock and my body, pressed up against it like I was one of those lichens. There was another foot hold nearer to my hip and I lifted my leg unnaturally and set the pointed toe of the shoe into it. They were biting painfully into my ankles, but I guess I could see the point of little tiny shoes if you're trying to stuff your feet into little tiny cracks. I looked for another hold above my head and there it was, just waiting for my fingers. I managed to scramble up the rock three more holds before I made the mistake of looking down.

_The ground was __so fucking far away_ and my palms went instantly clammy. I'd left my little chalk bag on the ground and realized with a moment of panic that I needed it right about now. My fingers were slowly giving way now that they were coated in a thin sheen of dread and scraped painfully against the rock. I could feel the layers of skin being left behind. I tried to grip harder, but there was just nothing there to hold onto. When I lost my grip entirely, I tried hard not to think about my landing.

_Oh shit._

"Woah there."

I was suddenly off the rock, but still not on the ground, hyper aware of two big biceps on either side of mine and hot breath on my neck in a chuckle. I was set back down on my feet, legs trembling even worse than before and looked up to find the Shirtless Guy unwrapping his arms from around me.

"Thank you." I stuttered, fully aware that my body wasn't broken right now because of him.

He looked down at my fingers.

"Chalk. Every time. Or at least every other time, until you build up some calluses."

I glared at my fingers, hating them for not having calluses. He bent and plucked my chalk bag from the ground, stepping forward to tie it around my waist and his naked-ass chest was right there in front of my face. I blinked at his biceps, astounded that muscles could even look like that and fully understood why, considering that every muscle in my own body was burning from the exertion.

_Was it the exertion? _

"You don't have a crash pad?" He asked, his eyebrow quirked and his hair falling across his forehead. I wanted to push it out of the way, but was blaming that impulse on the near-death experience he'd just saved me from.

"A what?" I shook my head up at him, confused and trying to remember my name, in case he asked that too.

"A crash pad." He grinned at me. "Big squishy thing? Breaks your fall?"

"Well, _no_, but that sounds helpful." I grumbled and looked at the ground, suddenly aware that the area below where I wanted to climb was just as hard and rocky as all the rest of it.

"What are you _doing_ out here, Sparkles?" He shook his head in amazement, as though I was really some forest fairy who had no right to be climbing rocks. I'm sure I looked as out of place as I felt.

"What did you call me?"

"You have glitter all over your face." He chuckled even though I was sort of scowling at him.

"_Alice_." I growled and smashed my hands to my face, rubbing vigorously and sure enough, when I pulled away there was glitter all over my palms. It was probably from when she hugged me this morning and told me not to break myself. That little fucking fairy was gonna pay.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chalk:4**

"So...how'd it go?"

Alice busted into the house like she owned the place. She did own a key, but it was supposed to be for emergencies and I sure didn't see any fires. I tried to scowl at her, remembering the sparkles she'd sabotaged me with, but she looked too damn cute to be mad at. Like a four year old in a frilly skirt and a top that looked suspiciously like a bedazzled leotard.

"It was... terrifying." I said truthfully, because in all honesty I could barely get myself back to the car and when I did, I had to sit there for a while before my body would function again enough to operate a vehicle.

I'd high-tailed my ass out of there once shirtless-guy plucked me off the wall, claiming that I had to get home and he grinned slyly at me as I packed up my things and fought with my tiny excuses for shoes. They were suctioned to my feet, I swear, and even though I used every ounce of strength I had left (which wasn't much, believe me) I couldn't get them off. Shirtless Guy watched for a while, making me nervous for ages before he eventually dropped to his knees in front of me and shimmied the shoe off my foot with practiced ease. He was a lot more gentle on me than I had been on myself. My face flamed red and I tucked me feet back into my sneakers without socks on, desperate to get out of there.

He trailed me back to the rock where his Giant Friend was still trying to get to the top.

"Man, this rock is manky. I can't climb that shit." Giant Friend fell to his feet beside us and I shuffled my own feet, sweaty in my sneakers, wondering what the fuck he was saying. Shirtless Guy smiled at his Giant Friend, a spark of evil in his eyes that made my knees feel even more quivery than they already did.

"_I _did it. Manky rock and all."

"Yeah, but you've got magic fingers and fucking super powers. "Giant Friend griped. "Plus, I'm like _four_ of you."

_No joke._

"I'm just gonna go now." I stuttered, hooking my thumb over my shoulder in the direction of my far-away car. "Thanks for the . . . you know." I chanced a glance up at Shirtless Guy one last time and goddamn, his eyes were greener than anything around us.

"No problem, Sparkles. Maybe we'll see you around again sometime." It sounded like he was encouraging me and making fun of me all at the same time and I'm sure I blushed brilliant red underneath all those damn sparkles. I bit my lip and rounded on my heel and the last thing I heard was Giant Friend asking Shirtless Guy just _what_ it was I was thanking him for.

"That's a Gumby, for sure," he answered.

"What the fuck do you think a _Gumby_ is?" I asked Alice and she scrunched her face at me.

"Like that green, floppy guy from TV?"

_Oh_. Well that makes perfect sense. Green and floppy. That probably summed up just exactly what I'd looked like.

"Why?" Alice asked when I didn't respond and I rolled my eyes at her.

"I overheard some guys talking. They speak a different fucking language."

_Manky? What?_

"There were _guys_ out there?" Alice giggled, excited even though I knew it would take more than threats of death to get her into a pair of those stupid shoes. "_Cute_ guys?"

"You would not believe." I sighed, my head chock full of bulging muscle.

"Are you gonna go back?"

I was trying to push Shirtless Guy's naked chest away and wondered if it wasn't teasing I'd heard in his voice after all. Maybe it had been anticipation? It sounded almost as though he was inviting me back. He'd probably be a good teacher, what with his apparent magic fingers and super powers.

"Yeah. I think I am."


	5. Chapter 5

**Chalk:5**

I went back.

Mostly because I laid awake in bed all night hating on that rock. I felt like it had beaten me somehow, that I'd been offered a challenge by something that didn't even breathe or sleep or cry, and I'd failed. It was a _rock_. A fucking piece of earth that shouldn't have been nearly that formidable, but it was.

I hated on the rock in lieu of fantasizing about Shirtless Guy.

Which I also failed at.

I made it back to my nemesis the next afternoon without spotting any other human life along the way, breathing a sigh of relief as I dropped my newly purchased crash pad to the ground. A puff of dust splayed out around it when it landed. It wasn't as heavy as it looked, but it wasn't exactly lightweight and I was glad I didn't have to carry it anymore. The thought of hauling it back to the car was heartbreaking.

"Hey there, Sparkles. Fancy seeing you here."

_Gah_. Shirtless Guy. Leaning against a tree and looking expectant.

Even though I wasn't surprised, I sure wasn't fucking prepared either.

"There are no sparkles today. I checked." I told him, sitting on the edge of the crash pad and pulling my shoes from my backpack. I hadn't let Alice come within three feet of me this morning and even did a cursory once-over in my rear-view mirror before leaving the relative safety of my car.

"Who _is_ this Alice person and when can I meet her?" He sat down next to me and I tried to ignore him while I tugged on my shoes. He was wearing a shirt this time, which was a little sad but the bands of muscles in his arms were flexing and I was kind of upset he was asking about _Alice_. Had I said her name out loud, or did he remember it from yesterday?

"Why?" I muttered, trying not to sound too jealous.

"I have a friend who sounds right up her alley." He stood, his shoes already on and I wondered how the fuck he did that so fast. I only had half of one foot successfully into mine and he was already staring up at the rock.

"You have a friend who wears lots of glitter?" His answer surprised me, and I wondered if he knew his friend might be kind of gay.

"No." Shirtless Guy chuckled. "But he picks up sparkly rocks wherever he goes. You could push him into a lake at the end of any given day and he'd probably sink right to the bottom. He's got a thing for shiny stuff."

"So does Alice." I muttered, remembering the disco ball she'd tried to get my to hang in my living room. It ended up in hers. Far more fitting.

"So, I'll uh . . . I'll give you some beta if you want? It's not that hard of a problem, once you know where to put your hands." He looked back over his shoulder at me, his hair a little wild and I shook my head at him in confusion.

"You speak an entirely different language."

"What did I say?" He grinned, full of teeth and lips and just a tad too much facial hair to be decent.

"Beta? What's a beta? A fish?"

"No." He laughed at me, again, which seemed to be becoming a thing with us. "Beta is like . . . _information_. Instructions. I'll give you beta on the climb?" He offered and nodded his head when he saw I understood.

We spent an hour at the rock. I watched Shirtless Guy climb the route a couple of times, trying my damnedest to pay attention instead of ogling his ass before I tried again. _Boy_, was it an experience. I learned that the spot where I'd torn all my skin off last time was called a '_sloper_,' a flat expanse of rock with no obvious place to grip that you just had to slap your hand hard against and use nothing but brute force to keep yourself there. Learned that the little ledges I was tucking my fingertips onto were '_crimpers_' and that I'd probably never have another manicure again for as long as I lived. I didn't make it to the top, falling to my ass on the crash pad more times that I cared to admit, but Shirtless Guy only said that I needed to be a little stronger and then it would be like child's play.

Climbing rocks for fun is _totally_ child's play.

No matter how pornographic Shirtless Guy made it look.

He noticed me examining my hands as we were packing up, the sun starting to sink behind the trees. The skin on my fingertips was raw, my palms felt like sandpaper and I was bleeding just a little on the knuckle of my index finger. The white powdery chalk I'd been using all afternoon was cemented to my skin with sweat, sunken into the ridges and halo-ing my broken spots. Shirtless Guy took me by the wrist and pulled my hand toward him to examine it, his fingers pressed to my pulse.

"You've gotta take care of your hands, or you won't be climbing at all for a while." He let go of me to rummage through his bag and I clutched my hand to my chest, blood throbbing just below where his thumb had been. "Use this tonight."

He gave me a jar of green goopey salve and that's when I noticed his own hands. If my hands looked bad, his looked even worse. There were spots like mine where the skin was sort of rubbed off, but still others that looked a week old, or even months old. His fingers were callused and there were deep ridges of skin protecting the side of his hands. I wondered how often he was out here, but judging from the thickness of those calluses, I thought it was probably a lot.

"It looks like you need this more than I do." I tried to give him the jar back and he followed my gaze to his own hands before he laughed low in his chest.

"I have more at home."

We got back to the parking lot by the road, our cars the last two there, just as the sun disappeared entirely and everything went that odd lilac color it did just at twilight.

"What did you call me yesterday? When I was leaving?" I asked him as I slammed the back door of my car closed behind the giant pad that just barely fit in there. Shirtless Guy reddened a little at the neck and shrugged, watching me as he leaned against his own car, something too small and shiny for a grungy rock climber.

"It was nothing."

"_Gumby_." I narrowed my eye at him, trying to look scary. "What does that mean?"

"You're just _new_, is all. Everyone gets called that at first, but you'll grow out of it. Besides, I kind of like Sparkles."

"There are no sparkles today." I reminded him, waving my hand in front of my face.

"That doesn't mean I'm going to forget them."


	6. Chapter 6

**Chalk:6**

Alice was harvesting sweet peas from the fence when I got home, a ring of flowers in her hair. I wandered to the backyard to watch her, slumping into the grass on my side of the viney melee.

"You look terrible. What happened to your hands?" Alice asked, brutally honest, as usual.

"I went back to the rock."

"Did you make it?" She was fully aware of my torment over the inanimate object after letting me bitch about it for an hour over the fence and coffee this morning.

"No. But I got closer."

"You need to find someone to show you how." Alice mused, still plucking peas and from my spot in the grass, the smell of the flowers was a little overwhelming. Cloudy and heavy with sticky sweetness and my head was spinning, Shirtless Guy's long fingers against the rock suddenly the only thing I could see.

"I already do. This guy has been helping me."

"One of the cute ones?" Alice twittered, excited for no reason again.

"Very. But I'm trying to learn from him, so I'm not paying attention."

Case in point, I didn't even know his name. He was just Shirtless Guy, even when he was wearing a shirt.

* * *

I found him the next day on one of the very first rocks lodged out in the meadow. He was wearing a shirt again today, which was disappointing, but was also wearing a pair of loose jeans that looked as though they'd been washed to the point of disintegration, rolled up a little at the cuffs to keep them free of his feet. I watched him scrambled up the side of the rock like he was a damned spider and he grinned at me from the top.

"Hiya, Sparkles."

"I hate that you call me that."I cringed when he leapt from the rock but he landed nimbly with a puff of dust beside me, crouched like an animal before he straightened up. I wondered if he was waiting for me out here.

"I'm probably gonna keep calling you that for a while. Until you earn a new one." He told me through a smile, plucking the crash pad from my back and leading the way to my rock. He didn't even ask, just brought us there, and I wondered if he sensed my frustration.

We climbed again for a while, Shirtless Guy doing it once for my refreshment (or benefit) before letting me take my place up against the rock. It took six attempts but I'd just managed to press myself hard enough against that damn sloper to finally move passed it when a yell through the trees startled me right off the rock.

I landed with a thump against Shirtless Guy, who caught me before I hit the pad.

"Edward!" The cry came again, echoing through the trees and Shirtless Guy cupped a hand to his mouth before crowing into the air just like he had when I saw him reach the top of that rock the first day. He set me down on the pad, hands steady until I was upright and I tried not to get mad that not only did I almost _finally_ make it up that damn rock, but that I'd also accidentally learned his name.

I was kind of fond of Shirtless Guy.

A moment later a blonde boy came loping out of the trees, another crash pad on his back. As he neared I could hear a subtle jangle emanating from him, his pockets looking heavy and I knew for certain that this was the Glitter Friend who collected sparkly rocks.

Giant Friend and Glitter Friend and Shirtless Guy. For all I hated Sparkles, I wondered how much they'd all hate the names I'd given them in my head if I said the out loud.

"Hey man, what the fuck are you doing way out here? The Passion Pit is back that-a-way." The blonde dropped the pad off his back and looked at Shirtless Guy (Edward?) curiously before eyeing me. His eyes dropped to my waist and I looked down at the chalk handprint on my thigh that most certainly did not come from me.

"Oh." the blonde guy chuckled, as if that handprint explained it all.

"Jasper, this is-" Shirtless Edward stopped short and looked down at me with his eyes wide, obviously just now realizing that we didn't exactly know each other's names.

"Bella." I offered. "And you're Edward."

He nodded at me and I turned to Jasper, otherwise known as Glitter Friend with a grin on my face.

"How many rocks you got in your pockets, Jasper?" He blushed instantly and threw an accusing glare at Edward. "You should meet my friend Alice."


	7. Chapter 7

**Chalk:7**

"What's the Passion Pit?" I asked Edward the next day, gulping down my inner riot girl to take his hand and let him help me up the last steep part of the trail. He basically pulled my arm out of its socket, hauling me into the air like a rag doll and plopping me onto my feet next to him in the meadow, shaking his head at me.

"Not for you. Not yet."

"But, what is it?" I pressed, knowing full well that it could be a person, place, thing or imaginary fucking creature, depending on the slang. Half of the time I still had no idea what he was saying.

"A problem I've been working on for a while." His face compacted in the center and for a moment he looked just as frustrated as I probably did most of the time. I hadn't seen this problem of his, but I was fairly certain it would put my own problem to shame.

Edward watched me struggle with my shoes again when we made it to my rock, but didn't offer to help this time. He handed me a roll of white medical tape before I stood. He'd already bandaged his own hands, covering up several of the spots I'd noticed yesterday. The salve he gave me worked wonders last night, but my knuckles still felt sore and chaffed.

"Tape up those fingers, Sparkles, or you're gonna live to regret it."

He ended up taking pity on me and helped to wind the tape around my fingers, his calluses against my wrists and long fingers prodding the cradle of my palms. I tried to ignore how good he smelled. I was failing at everything these days.

I got to the top this time.

Conquered that stupid, _stupid_ rock like a fucking champion. A gumby champion, green and floppy, but successful nonetheless. I scrambled to my feet, heart pounding in my throat and screamed at the tops of my lungs, so full of adrenaline that my knees were shaking. I could see why Edward had done just such a thing on the top of that other rock because it just felt so fucking good to let it out. He tiptoed nimbly up the rock I'd struggled so fucking long on and gave me an awkward high five.

"Pretty good for a flat-lander, Sparkles." More of that killer smile.

"I have the feeling that's not a compliment." I accused him and he grinned so hard at me it almost seemed like he was proud of me for making the connection.

"Flat-lander. You know... those of you who never venture off the horizontal." He gestured to the ground which, now that I stopped to look at it was _really freaking far_ below us. I can't believe I climbed up that. I stuttered and I'm sure that my face turned a little green because the next thing I knew I was slumped against Edward and he was gripping me tightly by the arm, my vision spinning.

"Sorry. Me and heights aren't all that awesome together." I panted.

"Rule number one, don't look down. Always up." Edward propped me back on my own feet and was standing way too close for me to blame all this dizziness on vertigo. I blinked up at him, blinded by the sun or him, vertigo draining slowly away.

"Always up." I parroted, trying to remember what we were talking about.

We heard a loud whoop through the trees as we were heading back to the cars and Edward scowled in the direction the noise had come from, huffing under his breath. He loped into the forest without telling me and I followed him without asking. Glitter Friend was watching Giant Friend attempt what looked like an absolutely impossible line on of the biggest rocks I'd seen here so far, the chalk fading out higher and higher until it was just _gone_.

I assumed this to mean that no one had ever reached the top.

"You know that's supposed to be mine, right?" Edward said as he sidled up to Jasper and I wondered if this was the elusive Passion Pit problem that apparently wasn't for me.

"You've been back there on that VB problem for some reason." Jasper eyed me again with a smirk. "Kind of left it up for grabs, you know?"

"VB?" I asked. Again, these boys confused the fuck out of me.

"Beginner level." Edward smiled at me. "On a scale from one to sixteen, it doesn't warrant a number."

"And what's this, then?" I waved at Giant Friend on the enormous rock. "A V5?"

Edward choked in his throat and threw a cursory glance at the rock. "Try _15_, Sparkles. That's about as high as it gets."

"_This_ is Sparkles?" Jasper arched both eyebrows at Edward. "Your _Gabby_?"

"Gumby." I corrected him. I wondered if they'd had a conversation about me last night and barely suppressed the urge to scream '_Glitter_!' in Jasper's face.

"Gabby." He responded wrong again and I saw him exchange a look with Edward that made Jasper go wide-eyed and Edward's jaw turn to stone.

* * *

**AN:** There are several different methods used to rate the difficulty of climbing routes, but the most common one is the V Scale, otherwise known as the Hueco Scale. The scale spans from 0-16, and doesn't count for fear or danger, only the physical challenge presented. So, while the Passion Pit lands at a rather improbable 15, Bella's VB climb rates too low to even qualify as a V0. ;)


	8. Chapter 8

**Chalk:8**

Alice forced me to the salon and bought me a manicure, even though I insisted that it was a waste of my time and her money. The ladies at the salon all cooed and clucked over my broken, scraped up hands, half of them wondering what the fuck would possess me to do such a thing to myself. None of them saw the allure that I did, but then again, they hadn't seen Edward live and in the flesh.

I forced Alice to the garden nursery once the salon women finally let us go and even though she played like she didn't want to go, she went bonkers once we arrived. Grabbed a cart and was off like a rocket, which left me to wander around alone and I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I had a green thumb, one that I didn't quite understand most of the time, but I seemed to have a knack for keeping things alive and flourishing. I was trying to decide between something called _chocolate_ mint and something else called _orange_ mint, wondering when they had started fucking with mint like this, my cart already overflowing, when he startled me.

"Hey there, Sparkles. It's about time we met in the real world."

_Oh god._

I turned to find Edward with a bag of fertilizer under one arm like it weighed nothing, even though I probably wouldn't have been able to lift it off the ground.

"Hi." I stuttered, blushing I'm sure.

"What did you do to your hands?" He asked, his voice tinged in awe and he picked up my palm to examine my fingers, now scrubbed and trimmed and painted within an inch of their lives. They didn't even look like mine, except for the scratches across the back of them and that ugly scab on my knuckle. I had been getting distracted by them all afternoon and it was probably why it was so hard to pick between chocolate and orange.

"I was threatened with death and dismemberment." I justified, watching him bend his head low over my hand to examine it. I'd never seen his own hands clean of chalk and I was amazed at how normal they looked, how unassuming they seemed, even if they were a little worse for wear.

Why the fuck was I feeling so breathless right now? It was like the third time he'd held my hand or some reason or another. I should be used to it by now.

"That would have made climbing hard, yes, but these might make it harder." He pressed the pad of his thumb over my newly painted nail, the coating making it feel unnaturally hard and unforgiving, definitely not something I'd want to scrape against bare rock. I told Alice this stupid manicure wouldn't last long.

The devil herself bounded around the corner in time to catch us with our hands clasped.

"Hey Bell- . . . Well, _hi_ there." She morphed from excited school kid to kittenish sex-pot in less than a millisecond, I swear, which was some kind of record for her. Edward really must be hot, it wasn't just a figment of my sun-addled brain. I had better keep my eye on her.

"Alice." I sighed and snatched my hand from Edward.

"_This_ is Alice? I've heard so much about you." Edward stared down at Alice as though she was a unicorn and not some girl dressed in what could have easily passed as a child's fairy costume from the Halloween section.

"You have not. You've just heard me complain about her." I grumbled and remembered Jasper asking him the same thing about me.

_"Your Gabby?"_

"What's a _Gabby_, anyway?" I jutted out my chin when i asked, trying to make myself look demanding.

"I thought it was Gumby?" Alice asked me and I watched Edward's face redden when he realized we'd been talking about him. Fair exchange, I thought.

"It _was_." I told her, staring him down. "Now it's Gabby. Whatever _that_ means."

"It just means that you have potential." Edward did more of that shrugging thing that told me it probably meant far more than just that.

"And?"

"_And_?" He tried to stare me down but I won. "And you're a girl. So what? I didn't think that part was important, but you made me say it out loud." He leveled me a look that made me knock-kneed even though I wasn't even near a rock. Weird.

"And I'm _yours_, huh?"

Edward gulped before he nodded his head deliberately.

I did more of my fancy escaping act to get us out of there, dragging Alice away and wishing Edward well with his fertilizer. We left him standing in a long row of ripening tomatoes and made our way to the checkout counter.

"_That_ is the guy you met climbing rocks?" Alice hissed in disbelief.

"Yeah." I nodded, still sort of dumbstruck and loopy off him. I was trying hard to tell myself that he only meant that he was _mentoring_ me, teaching and I was his pupil, even though the look in his eye when he nodded was far more territorial than that.

"Take me with you next time. This whole rock thing is getting more interesting by the day.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chalk:9**

"Peel off." Edward's voice rose up from around my ankles.

"Will you just speak in normal human words, _please_." I hissed, trying to readjust my grip. "I can't understand a fucking _thing_ you say when you talk in tongues."

Stress made me bitchy. And getting stuck spread-eagle six feet above the ground with no up in sight was stressing me the fuck out.

"Just let go, Bella."

"I'm not gonna just _let go_." I argued with him, stubborn even though I knew he was probably right. He was always right. He'd been right about my hands and my muscles, both of them evolving to suit my needs as time progressed. Within three weeks I'd grown myself some calluses that I have to admit I was a little proud of, and my muscles were starting to stand out in my arms when I climbed. My first problem on that nemesis rock really did seem like child's play now, and I think even Edward was surprised at how fast I picked it up.

He said I had a knack for spotting my lines and when I told him it was only because I had a good teacher, he shrugged silently as though that wasn't really it at all.

This was my fourth problem, one I'd picked out and Edward seemed skeptical of from the beginning. He'd tried to steer me toward something a little smaller, this particular problem at least four holds longer than anything I'd attempted yet, but I held my ground and he finally relented. I wouldn't let him climb this one first for my benefit, even though he was wearing cut off shorts today that would have made it quite enjoyable.

I wanted this one for myself.

"That right there," he pointed out a hold far above his head, "is the crux. The spot where it either happens, or it doesn't. You're gonna have to hit the hold sideways, do you see it? Instead of hanging off the ledge, you're going to brace against it."

Which was where I was right now. Stuck in the crux and unwilling to let go.

I'd done what he said, had my fingers wedged firmly against a vertical lip in the rock and was trying to figure out where to put my other hand. There wasn't anything in sight. I stretched my arm blindly, feeling with my fingertips for something to hold onto.

"It's too far." Edward called up at me. I'm sure he could see the next hold and I'm also sure it was only barely out of reach of my fingers. Just as I was contemplating giving in and 'peeling off,' my index finger slipped into a hole in the rock just big enough for me to hook my self inside up to my second knuckle. I tried not to think about what could be at the bottom of the hole and readjusted my newly sprouted callus on the underside of my finger against it.

Took a deep breath, poured all my strength into my hand and used it to haul myself just high enough to put my foot on the next ledge.

Let the adrenaline and pain pumping through my finger carry me onward without bothering to stop, blindly ascending the rock in a blurried daze of tunnel-vision.

Got more of that shaky-leg thing at the top that Edward called Disco Knees and had to double over with my hands on my thighs to catch my breath.

I looked down to find Edward staring up at me in disbelief. I was getting this look from him and Alice so often that I was starting to get used to it. Neither of them seemed to believe what I was doing, but on entirely different ends of the spectrum.

* * *

We found Jasper was on his own rock a little ways off, stripped down to a pair of shorts and panting against the stone. I watched with Edward, silent, as he finished his climb and did a little victory dance on top. He noticed us only after he finished and looked embarrassed as he made his way off the backside of the rock.

"You need a spotter. That's too Highball to do on your own." It sounded like Edward was admonishing him and from Jasper's reaction, I guess that he kind of was.

"Emmett's climbing with Rose on Coffin Nails and you've been off with Sparkles here, doing god knows what." Japer shrugged in defiance.

"She topped the Lock and Key." Edward said as if it justified something. All these problems had the strangest names.

"The Lock and Key?" Jasper gasped and I tried not to be offended that he sounded so surprised.

"On-sight." Edward flashed a cocky smirk at Jasper and I scrunched my forehead up, trying to figure out what _that_ one might mean. Jasper turned on me with an appreciative face, as though it was the first time he was really seeing me.

"_Dang_, honey. I didn't think you had it in you."

"Means you did it on the first try, Sparkles. Without any beta." Edward finally explained so that I could stop with the face-scrunch thing. I'm sure it wasn't all that attractive. I was already covered in dirt and chalk and scratches and bruises, adding an ugly face would jut be the cherry on the sundae.

"You told me about the crux, though." I thought that probably qualified as beta.

"Barely." He shook his head at me, his eyes narrowed.

"And that's a good thing? On-sight?" I asked, just to clarify. He ran his tongue across his bottom lip before pulling it into his mouth for a split second too short, his eyes sort of glazing over, and nodded his head.

"Very."


	10. Chapter 10

**Chalk:10**

I finally relented and took Alice with me two weeks after we met Edward in the tomatoes. She bugged me about it every morning over the sweet peas until I got sick enough of her and broke, agreeing to let her tag along. I still hadn't told her about Jasper and his glitter fetish, not entirely sure how the two of them would be able to find common ground. He was usually scratched and scraped and dirty while she was never anything less than impeccable.

Which was why it took me so long to give in, and I knew within an instant that I had been_ so wrong_ in thinking that she might rein herself in for this.

She showed up at my door wearing a fucking ballet costume. Seriously. All puffy moss-green tulle and a bodice sewn in with sequins and silky flowers and lacy embroidery. She had her big-ass camera around her neck because along with getting drunk and pretending she was in Paris, she liked to pretend she was a photographer too.

"You're not seriously wearing that, are you?" I sighed, eyeing her and wondering just what all those chalk-covered climbers were going to think of me if I showed up with her in tow. "You got that from a costume store."

"I did not." Alice huffed and fingered the flowers at her waist. The top looked like one of those corseted contraptions from the sixteenth century and curved around her like a vice, her boobs practically spilling out of the top. "It's from Neiman Marcus and it's very expensive."

"Are you sure you want to wear it out in the woods? You're probably going to ruin it." I tried a last ditch effort, but saw instantly that it wouldn't work.

"You speak as if you don't know me."

* * *

Alice disappeared the moment we entered the trees. She'd been darting around the entire way up here, her camera firmly attached to her face. I'd convinced her to at least wear her knee-high boots since she was going to be tromping through bushes and brambles, and she looked like a forest-fairy from the wrong side of the trees.

I let her go, hoping that if she screamed loud enough I'd be able to hear her and went off in search of the boys. Jasper had been joining us more and more ever since I did that Lock and Key problem 'On-sight,' as though it changed something. I still kind of had the feeling that Edward let me slide in order to claim the distinction, what with his pointing out the crux and all, but he told me that I'd found that finger hold all on my own and that only my tiny little hands could have used it like that anyway.

According to him, he couldn't even get the tip of his pinky into that hole.

I found them at the Passion Pit, the ground littered in crash pads and _both_ of them shirtless this time. Win.

"You're going to have to campus around that lip. Go up from the right side rather than left." Jasper was pointing to a jutting triangle of rock at least twelve feet above the ground, right in the very center of the stone.

"What's a campus?" I spoke up, both of the boys looking over at me, Edward's face breaking into a smile. I tried not to glance down at his abs. _Dear god, were 24-packs even possible?_

"Just hands. No feet."

I looked back up at the spot Jasper had pointed out and got scared simply imagining Edward dangling from his fingers with nowhere to put his feet for at least a couple yards of rock. Before I could voice my concerns he was already at it again, Jasper stepping in behind him and holding his hands just inches from Edward's back as he climbed, in case he fell.

It looked impossible. The holds were spaced far apart and barely qualified as holds in the first place. Even Edward seemed like he was struggling and it didn't surprise me that no one had ever topped this particular problem. It's name was beginning to make more and more sense. Jasper stepped back when Edward got too far out of his reach, but didn't leave the edge of the crash pad, eyes trained on his friend the entire time. I wondered if that was what Edward did as I climbed, my ass in his face, ready to catch me if I fell, and flamed a little around the edges.

Edward got stuck in the crux, just like I had before and cursed under his breath, grumbling at the rock as though they were long-distance friends with some serious quarrels to settle.

"What's up with this rock?" I asked Jasper, both of us watching Edward slap the rock with his bare hand in frustration above our heads.

"He wants the first ascent."

"Which is?"

"No one's ever climbed it before. He wants to be the first."

Edward finally calmed down enough to move onward and we watched him find a good grip on the edge of that jutting lip of stone, his face serious as he fingered gingerly along the edge. The panic was back, a fluttering in my throat that made my mouth go dry as I watched him prepare to rely on nothing but his fingertips.

A flash of glittered green caught my eye and I turned away from the rock to see Alice step out from the trees, her hair a mess and a trailing bouquet of flowers in her hand. The sunlight pouring through the trees made her blindingly bright for a split second as she passed through a solid beam of it, and I heard Jasper's breathing go shallow beside me.

"Who is _that_?" He gasped.

We both whipped our heads back to the rock at the sound of Edward's exuberant yowl, wrenching our eyes from Alice to see him on top of the rock with his hands in the air, chest heaving, dripping sweat.

First ascent.

And we'd missed it.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chalk:11**

Jasper didn't say a single word for almost an hour and Alice rambled like a toddler on speed, which I took to mean that they were both a little enamored with each other. He nodded mutely when she offered to show him the pictures she had been taking and pulled his shirt back on before he sat next to her in a soft hollow of grass to peer over her shoulder.

I sat with Edward and we both stared up at the climb he'd just completed, his chalky handprints only barely visible from the single, momentary touches he'd left behind.

"I want to try it again, but I'm too bricked out." He muttered and strained his forearm, muscles and veins bulging under his skin. His hands were trembling slightly.

"Bricked out." I didn't even have to ask it as a question. By now he knew that he confused the fuck out of me with practically every word he said.

"Too . . . _pumped_, I guess. I couldn't hold onto that rock right now, even if I wanted to."

"How long have you been working on it?" My eyes traced the steps of the route, heart flip-flopping as I mentally traversed the jutting lip of stone.

"Four months. Nearly every damn day, until I met you." He smirked sideways at me as if he was blaming me for distracting him.

"And you went and wasted your time on the beginner problems." I played along and he nodded.

"It was probably good for me, made me get back to the basics for a moment. I was getting in too deep to see it clearly." He clutched his hands together and I wondered if it was to stop them from shaking.

"Did _you_ name it?"

"No, some local kid did. He died here a few months ago."

"On _this_ climb!" I whispered in horror, that frightened feeling I had watching Edward up there rushing back in full force. I had apparently been spot on.

"Yeah." He looked back up at the rock thoughtfully. "It should probably have a top rope. It's almost too tall to be considered entirely safe without one."

"A V15." I remembered and he nodded again. "How high up does that scale go?" I asked, expecting him to answer with a 20 or even a 50. His response scared the ever-living shit out of me.

"16. Which is basically considered impossible."

* * *

We left Jasper and Alice laying in the grass near the Passion Pit and hiked further into the woods, each of us carrying a crash pad. I was working on a new problem, one I picked simply because of the name.

Damned If She Do was nestled clear up at the base of the cliff, just high enough that you could see over the tree tops and the horizon stretched out like one of those paintings they bolt to the walls in hotel rooms. A little too picturesque to be plausible. The rock was a soft muted rose color, freshly broken off and its edges weren't worn smooth by the wind or the rain yet. I'd torn a callus clean off here a few days ago and was harboring a grudge.

I tried a couple of times, getting mysteriously caught halfway up which frustrated the fuck out of me because I'd gotten a lot farther the day the rock ate my hand. I fell to the crash pad in a huff, full of disgust and stood, dunking my hand into my chalk bag to hide my annoyance.

"Take this off. It's snagging on the rock." Edward fingered the hem of my t-shirt, loose cotton fabric that draped attractively around me, but he was right. It was catching on the rough face of the rock and probably only impeding my progress. I gulped down my morality and shed the shirt, trying not to feel like he was staring, which was impossible because he was. Fair, but only because I totally stared at him when he was shirtless, which was often. He'd never seen me quite this unclothed before and while I was wearing a sports bra which mashed my boobs down to half their size, I was certainly displaying a lot more skin than I ever had before.

I made it by that elusive spot due to my current lack of clothing, only to get stuck two holds up. The rock face was practically an overhang, angled out over the ground just enough that I had to grip even harder with my fingers to even keep myself on the wall, much less move anywhere. I was just about to attempt for the next hold when I felt his fingers on my back.

Just barely. Pressed softly to the skin just below my rib cage.

_I'm sure he'd probably done this before, anticipated and hovered his hand behind me for support incase I came unhinged, but this was the first time it was skin to skin and I could barely concentrate on anything around it. I let go of the rock with a gasp and he caught me under the arms, lowering me to the mat which really only made me slide slowly down the length of his entire body._

Hot skin to hot skin.

He stepped away from me the moment my feet touched the pad and hunched his shoulders up around his ears while he crouched to dig in his bag industriously. He pulled out a toothbrush and I wondered if he wanted to brush his teeth before he kissed me.

_Wait, what?_

"Let's clean up that hold for you. It looks like a bummer." He stepped up the rock with the stem of the toothbrush between his teeth, placing his hands deliberate and sturdy on the spots I barely felt like I could get a grip on. It was like watching a wild animal in its natural environment, a mountain lion plodding through the tree tops with practiced comfort.

"You climb like a mountain lion." I blurted, without even really meaning to and even though he didn't look down at me, I saw him grin to himself when he pulled the toothbrush from between his teeth and started brushing at that hold he thought had tripped me up. _Bummer_ around these parts only meant that the hold was uncomfortable (or more so than normal) and would probably tear the skin off your hand. He didn't need to know that the hold wasn't the reason I let go.

"Well, _you_ climb like a ballerina." He retorted and I tried to imagine what I looked like when I climbed. Ballerina was really the very last connection I would have made, and I hadn't even seen myself.

"I do not."

"Yeah, you do. Just like Rose. It must be a girl thing."

"And Jasper? What does he climb like?"

"Like a damn mathematician. He has to plot out the whole thing in his head before he'll even _try_ it. And the entire time he has this look on his face like he can't remember the formula for gravity."

I'd watched Jasper a lot over the last few weeks and Edward's observation made total sense. Jasper took a lot of time at the base of the rock before he climbed, much more than Edward. He would sit and stare at the problem for an hour, his eyes jumping and his muscles flexing until he was ready, which could come out of nowhere, mind you. He would stand without warning and float up the rock like the laws of physics didn't apply to him. He was the king of 'on-sighting' and that was why he was so impressed with my Lock and Key triumph.

"Emmett is like a heavy-weight." Edward was still brushing the rock, sounding amused. "He just grabs on and bear-hugs himself to the top. He doesn't call it Pebble Wrestling for nothing."

This was quite the odd group I'd stumbled across. A mountain lion who had an obvious grudge against clothing, a mathematician with a thing for iridescent sparkles and a wrestler who just might as well be a giant and probably gave great bear hugs. I hoped this Rose girl wouldn't think that there was only room for one ballerina in the mix and wondered where the hell a fairy with a serious case of childhood envy was going to fit in.

* * *

When I got home, I turned to examine myself in the hallway mirror and there they were. Edward's fingerprints, powdery and a little smudged, in a fan pattern across my skin.

I spent the entire night rolling around in bed to my chalk-dusted fantasies.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chalk:12**

I was determined to get my own chalky fingerprints on his skin the next day.

"If you want to try the Passion Pit again, I'll spot you," I huffed as we crossed the meadow. Edward shot me a cynical look and chuckled.

"Honey, I would _crush_ you if I landed on top of you."

I tried not to think of the dirty way that could have been taken and focused instead on the fact that he'd called me something other than that horrid nickname.

"I like that a lot better than Sparkles."

"You're currently failing that one. I haven't seen a single sparkle in weeks."

We ducked into the tree before he spoke again, sounding as though his mouth betrayed the tail end of his thought.

"I was thinking, Twinkle Toes."

"Ugh." I groaned. "No, _please_." I was fully prepared to grovel if need be. Plus, I was willing to bet that the view from below would probably be fantastic.

"Don't worry, I'm still working on it."

We headed back to Damned If She Do, scrambling over smaller tumbles of rock and found it already occupied. Emmett was just giving a beautiful blonde a girl a helpful push up the last of my current problem, boosting her over the edge with a hand on her ass.

"You didn't have to do that, asshole." She pulled herself to her feet and glared down at Emmett. "I had it in the pocket."

"I know you did, but I couldn't help it. It was just right there in my face." Emmett defended himself half heartedly, grinning up at her in a way that did nothing for his sincerity.

"You pervert. No wonder you do this." She huffed and pranced off the low side of the rock with all the grace of a gazelle. I could see the ballerina flair Edward had mentioned, her hands poised and her neck held long and straight, but there was a wild animal quality about her that brought those nimble, leaping creatures to my mind. She stepped up beside us as Emmett started up the rock and smiled at me.

"You must be Sparkles."

"Bella." I corrected, glaring at Edward.

"Right." Rose snickered at the look that passed between us, Edward rolling his eyes as I tried my best to burn holes in his neck with my own. Rose turned on Edward with a hand to his arm and I fought the jealousy that she'd gotten ahold of his bare skin before I did.

"I heard you red-lined the Passion Pit. Congratulations."

Edward shrugged off the compliment. "Took me long enough."

"_Whatever_, you humble shit head. You know that everyone's had their eyes on _that_ prize ever since James . . . ." She faltered and eyed Emmett on the rock. "I knew it would be you." She exhaled her words with a certainty that I found a little unnerving.

I failed at my fingerprint mission. We stayed at the rock all afternoon, but the boys stepped aside and let Rose and I have at it, I think mostly to watch us shimmy our ways up the rock. Rose seemed to leap for each hold, pushing her body forward with just a little more force than everyone else and each time it looked for a split second like she was in mid air. I stood next to Edward, watching her second successful ascent.

"I think you're wrong about the ballerina thing." I mused as she stretched her arms to the sky from the top of the rock, her fingers splayed like antlers.

"Why's that?"

"I think she's a gazelle."

Edward squinted up at her silhouette against the sunlight and nodded.

"Fitting."


	13. Chapter 13

**Chalk:13**

The boys weren't climbing the next time I found them.

Instead, they had a thick piece of webbing strung up tightly between two trees, enough tension in the fabric to keep it stretched taunt, even when you stood on it. Which was what Jasper was doing, balanced in the middle of that wobbly looking material with his arms outstretched for balance. His lower half was trembling from side to side on the rope, but his upper body remained amazingly still.

He lifted his foot gently and took a tentative step, and then one more, crouched like a ninja.

Edward was lounging on a rock in a puddle of sun, eyes closed and hair on fucking fire. He seemed to prefer shorts that looked as though they had once been dress pants before he took a pair of scissors to them. Flat fronted and in a surprising variety of grays. I was starting to suspect that he always went commando.

Jasper caught a glimpse of me from the corner of his eye and was thrown off the webbing with much more force than I thought possible, flung to the ground in a wild tangle of limbs. He barely kept to his feet underneath him and turned to look at me with something that looked like a frown.

"Where's Alice? You didn't bring her?"

"Why does she not get some stupid nickname?" I grumbled and watched Edward sit up, scowling and shaking his head. His muscles bunched tighter, stomach a rippled pane of flesh and I struggled to keep my eyes on his hair.

"Flat-landers don't get nicknames." He said sourly.

Jasper looked like he didn't exactly agree and I wondered if he'd be the thing to get her onto a rock, just so he could give her a one.

They convinced me to try the _slack-line_, which lasted precisely two parts of a millisecond before I was tumbling back onto Edward. He was spotting me just as though I was on a rock, which was a good thing because the webbing sprung out from underneath my feet as I fell and I toppled like a bowling pin. The glancing moment my feet had been on that web felt far too unstable to trust and I shook my head at them as Edward set me back on my feet.

"No way. That's impossible."

Jasper smiled wryly at Edward. "Why don't you show her how it's done, Doll-face?"

"Seriously?" I gaped up at Edward. "That can't seriously be it."

"Why not? You don't agree?" Jasper snarked at me, totally onto my sort-of-secret crush. Which was ok because I was totally onto his.

"Oh, I _agree_. I'm just a little disappointed that it was the best you could do."

"You think you could come up with better?" Edward piped up, sounding like he was challenging me and I nodded at him. If he was planning my terrible nickname, then I was going to plan a better one for him too. He was stained a little red around the neck and I didn't know if it was from the sun, or me agreeing that his nickname was totally understandable.

"Show me how it's done, _Doll-face_." I smiled at him and he went even redder.

Edward took a little time with a single foot on the the rope, the other planted firmly on the ground as though he was testing the water. There was something hanging on a cord around his neck today that I'd never noticed before, bumping against his chest when he suddenly lifted his foot off the ground and set it softly behind the other on the thin strip of web. He tucked low and wobbled wildly for a moment before he pulled together and the web stilled to a mere vibration.

It looked hard, even for him, but I knew that he was probably making out to be _far_ easier than it actually was.

I watched him straighten slowly until he was standing almost upright. The muscles in his abdomen flexed and he stepped gingerly forward like a cat on the edge of a fence. He let the momentum carry him forward, the balls of his feet spanning the webbing in seconds and he hopped off the end with a flourish, the web barely moving an inch the entire time.

_Goddamn_.

"Wow," I said instead.

"Yeah. Edward's biggest talent is making all the rest of us look bad." Jasper stated blandly and Edward looked for a moment as though he wanted to stick his tongue out at him. He didn't do that, but he did flip him off.

"Is there anything you're not good at?" I asked, mostly to distract both of them.

"I can't really cook." Edward laughed and Jasper's jaw dropped.

"Really? Cause I was gonna say that you really suck at keeping your eyes off her ass when she climbs."

* * *

**AN:** What do you think that new nickname should be? I'm sure Edward is planning something dastardly...


	14. Chapter 14

**Chalk:14**

We were on the Paper Tiger, a climb along the underside of a low overhang that made me feel like a gecko trailing upside-down along a tree branch. There was a thin wavy crack in the rock just big enough to jam your fingers into and Edward had me taped up so much I looked like I was wearing gloves. He was worried because my hands were so small that I could slip an entire one into the same space he could only lodge into up to his knuckles.

"You might have to fist jam that." He said, eyeing my hand skeptically. He picked me up by the palm and curled my fingers into a fist, eyeing it dubiously.

"Are you going to ask me to hit you now?" I asked with a grin and he rolled his eyes at me.

"You're going to have to make a fist up in there and wedge it in the rock." He put his palms flat to the sides of my fist, mimicking the crack to illustrate his point. "It's probably gonna hurt like hell, but it might be the only way."

He was right again. It did hurt like hell, especially because I was hovering a foot or so off the crash pad, hair dangling and all my body weight on my poor fist lodged up in the crack of the rock. Even though it was cool under here, shaded and almost chilly, I broke out in a cold dew of sweat. I dislodged my fist and fell to the mat, rubbing my shoulder and wincing at my hand as I carefully flexed my fingers.

"Yeah, not ideal, but you're gonna have a hard time otherwise." Edward took my hand and pressed his fingers into my palm, the muscles underneath them protesting for a moment before they relaxed. He stretched each of my fingers out, pulling his own along them individually and even though it felt like heaven on my aching digits, I was stuck in a mire of dirty, _dirty_ thoughts.

Replacing his fingers with his mouth in my head.

Edward made it a whole lot farther along the crack than I did, shimmying along like he was on a mission, abs in fine form. I had just begun debating whether or not to tug the crash pads farther along when I saw him falter, fingers slipping along the rock and I put my hands out instinctually to soften his fall. He landed heavy and would have busted his skull open if it weren't for my hand, which padded his head from a rock.

A very sharp, very _hard_ rock.

"Ah!" I squealed and leapt away, clutching my hand to my stomach and jumping around in pain. My stomach rolled and I really hoped I wouldn't throw up or pass out. Edward was behind me in an instant, pulling me against his chest to get me to stand still and examining my hand carefully over my shoulder.

"I told you." He chastised me, sighing under his breath. "Just let me fall next time."

"I didn't mean it." I whimpered, even though I really had meant it and was secretly glad it was my hand and not his head. It was already starting to swell, the back of it throbbing and painfully hot. Edward tugged me back to the shade and the crash pads beneath the overhang, sitting beside me and doctoring up my hand with more of his fancy green goop. It hurt, not enough to make me think that it was broken, but I wasn't entirely sure that all my little bones weren't bruised bad enough to qualify. He gave me his water-bottle, still cool from the bottom of his backpack, to wrap my hand around and it wasn't as good as an ice pack, but it was better than nothing.

"Well Sparkles, we're going to have to find something else to do for a week or so." He spoke with his eyes trained on my injured hand and I frowned at him. I wouldn't think he'd be willing to stop climbing just because I hurt my hand. Maybe he felt a little guilty about it?

Not guilty enough to forego the nickname, obviously.

He insisted on driving my car home, citing driving-safety standards and my inoperable hand as his excuse. I sat in the passenger's seat, which I had never done before, and watched him wrap his hand around my gearshift, failing miserably at the whole '_don't think dirty thoughts about Edward_' deal. He called Jasper on the way and asked for a ride back to his own car, stuttering halfway through and his ears stained red before he snapped the phone shut with a roll of his eyes. I hadn't heard what Jasper said, but I wondered if it had something to do with me.

He wrote his phone number on my arm and told me that he'd never forgive me if I didn't call him the next day and let him come check on my hand. I stood on the sidewalk and was so glad he was getting into Jasper's car when he waved at me. I'm sure I turned a shade of red unbeknownst to man and at least by then he was too far away to see it.

When I ran out to the car later that night to retrieve my ipod, the gearshift was dusted with a fine mist of white powder, the fingerprint of his thumb clear on the very top of that shiny black ball.

* * *

**AN:** While it's true that bouldering problems are given all sorts of weird names (go ahead and google, you'll be surprised), none of these climbs actually exist. I've been naming them all after songs on various Spoon albums (don't ask, I'm a music junkie) and it's worked out quite to be quite interesting, don't you think?

**BTW:** Thank you to all of those who have been reviewing and even just lurking (because they give e fancy stats, so I know you're there. Speak up, yo. I don't bite.) Plus, all the rec's that have been coming in from various sites . . . Gah, it makes me feel so damn special. Each and every one of you deserves cookies and parades.


	15. Chapter 15

**Chalk:15**

Knocking on my front door summoned me from bed. My hand was pulsing as though I was gripping a hot coal in my fist and I was ready to rip Alice a new one for not just using her damn key. I flung the door open to find Edward, fully clothed and looking deliciously irritated.

"What are you doing here?" I panicked, fully aware that I was nowhere close to decently dressed for this.

"You didn't call."

"It's nine o'clock in the morning."

"How's your hand?" He ignored me, eyes falling to the burning coal I was clutching to my chest.

Just as I was about to retort there was more knocking, this time from the back door and I turned to spot Alice waving at me with a mug in one hand. I was late for our morning coffee date and I waved Edward inside, telling myself that he'd seen me in skin tight leggings and a bra . . . underwear and a tank top weren't much farther off the mark.

I tossed Edward out the backdoor to entertain Alice and dashed up to my room, throwing on the first piece of clothing my eyes spotted, something that was a little too long to be a shirt but a little too short to be a dress. Alice rolled her eyes at me when I emerged but I pretended not to notice. She hated everything I wore.

And vice versa.

We ended lounging in the yard all day, Alice making sun tea with peppermint and lavender out of the flower beds and Edward fondling my broken hand softly against an ice pack as we lay on my old faded quilt. I was enjoying the baking warmth and the repetitive stroking of Edward's fingers that only edged up on pain for split seconds before fading away. Both Alice and Edward had looked concerned when I allowed them to look at my hand, his eyebrows smashing together in the middle and her mouth forming an 'o' of amazement. They both insisted on the ice-pack.

"I'm sorry you can't climb today." I mumbled into the blanket, half asleep and felt Edward shift beside me, my toes brushing his legs.

"Who says I can't climb today? I see plenty of things to climb." He scanned the yard decisively and I scoffed at him.

"You can't climb up the house or anything."

"You want to put money down on that mouth of yours?" He smirked at me and jumped to his feet, abandoning his job of tending to my hand. I watched in equal parts horror and amazement as he strode toward the house and stopped right up against the wall, testing the siding with his fingers. Before I even processed what he was doing, he was four holds off the ground.

"What are you doing?" I asked, even though it was fairly obvious.

"Climbing the house. Can't you tell?" He laughed over his shoulder and scampered up a few more feet until he was lounging comfortably on the roof of the little covered porch. Alice emerged from her own kitchen and wandered across her yard distractedly, ducking through the fence into my own before she even noticed. She seemed awfully distracted lately.

"What in god's name are you doing?" She shielded her eyes against the sun to peer up at him. I thought he'd give her the same cynical retort he gave me, but he didn't.

"Proving Sparkles wrong." He smiled brilliantly at her. Maybe it was the sun.

He didn't come down the easy way either, and I was starting to understand that I shouldn't ever underestimate him because he'd likely prove me wrong. I thought that he'd shimmy down the columns that held up the porch, but instead he stretched those long fingers to snatch the rather flimsy looking top of the tree nearest to the porch.

"Edward, don't-!" I tried to stop him, but of course he didn't listen.

He flung himself off the roof and into the tree like a damn spider monkey.

The tree flopped wildly from side to side, heaving under his weight and it looked as though he was wrestling the limbs to get them back under control. He eventually succeeded, the tree calming itself and he kicked off his shoes from the lowest branch, both of them landing with a heavy plop in the grass.

Alice wandered the flower beds and I watched Edward stalk through the foliage that edged the yard, his feet stepping soft and sure along the limbs as he darted from tree to tree. For the most part he was just fleeting glimpses of tanned skin and gleaming hair. I lost track of him all together for a moment before he fell from the tree beside me, summoned by his ringing phone.

I listened to him take a call from Jasper, one-sided, while he paced the lawn.

"No, I'm shutdown today. Bella fucked up her hand."

It was the first time I'd heard him say my name out loud, or even call me by something other than Sparkles, and it did funny things to my insides.

"Spotting. . . Yeah, _me_." Edward growled into the phone. "Who the fuck else would it be?" He glanced over at me with a scowl on his face before his eyes darted to Alice who was kneeling in the strawberries. "Yes, she's here . . . Well, they live right next to each other and I'm watching her stuff her face with strawberries, so _yeah_. I'm sure."

He snapped the phone shut and looked over at me, shoving his hands into the pockets of those cut-off dress pants.

"Japer's coming over."

"Good. He can entertain Alice."

She would have responded herself, but her mouth was full of red.


	16. Chapter 16

**Chalk:16**

"Why did you follow me? That first day?" I asked him without even really meaning to. We were still on the blanket, the sun sinking low and even though we'd been out here all day, I didn't want to leave. Alice disappeared the moment Jasper arrived and we hadn't seen fur or feather of them in hours.

"You were pretty." Edward shrugged, pinking at the ears and looking far too cute for his own good. "You don't see pretty girls out there. They're on the videos, but never in real life."

"So you decided to stalk me?"

"I was curious. You didn't have a mat, and I knew there wasn't anyone further along for you to meet up with because we'd just been there. I thought you were maybe just hiking but I- . . . _You_ waved at me." His eyes narrowed as if it was really all my fault.

"I was just trying to be polite." I smirked at him and he shrugged, rolling over onto his back and staring up at the sky.

"Whatever the reason, I'm glad I did it."

"Why's that?"

He rolled his head on his arms to look at me, quirking an eyebrow but all I could stare at was the curve of his jaw. "You're good. Maybe a little _too_ good."

"Don't sound so surprised." I teased, rolling my eyes but he started nodding his head.

"I _am_ surprised. You on-sighted your fourth problem. You barely ever complain about your hands and you shouldn't have been able to do that Paper Tiger climb for at least another couple of months."

"I _didn't_ do it though." I'd only gotten two hold along before the fist-jam thing fucked me up. I could practically feel the little edge of rock I'd been digging my fingers into to hold myself up under that rock, no wider than a pencil, while my other hand curled and forced itself into a space that it shouldn't have fit into. _Oh, pain._

"You held on _upside down_ for almost a minute, I counted. I had you pegged at ten seconds."

"Again, I feel like I should be offended."

"Don't." He shook his head and peered at me thoughtfully for a moment before he continued, sounding almost as though he wasn't even talking to me, but to himself. "It _should_ make sense, shorter people are better climbers, but there's all the other-"

"Are you calling me short?" My instinctive response shot back.

"You _are_ short, Sparkles. Your toes are touching my knees."

I glanced down between us and sure enough, lying down at head level like this had kind of made me forget that he typically towered over me. I prodded his kneecaps with my bare toes just because I felt like I could and kept my eyes off his face when I spoke.

"Why are shorter people better? That seems totally backward."

"Your muscles are shorter. They contract quicker and it takes a lot less energy to keep them there." He held up his arm, clenching a fist and making the muscles in his forearm swell. When he plucked my own arm from the blanket and I held up it along side his, I could see what he meant. He had at least four inches of muscle on me to tense up.

"Shorter climbers need different beta and they usually end up climbing an entirely different route than someone who is taller might. You finding that finger-hold on the Lock and Key, for example. I'm glad you didn't listen to me when I told you to peel." He smiled at me again and I really wondered if he knew what that thing did my my insides.

I'd spent the entire day feeling like half-set jello, wobbly and precarious.

"And what's the other stuff?" I asked, breathless and flaming hot all of a sudden, wondering if it was the sun.

"Other stuff?"

"You were saying . . . because I'm short, but there's all the _other_..." I dangled, waiting for him to catch up. It didn't take long for him to narrow his eyes at me as though he was debating how much to tell me.

"Just, small things," he hedged with another shrug. "You picked up on the slang, and your observation about Rose was spot on. You didn't even blink when you started bleeding, and the way you scowl at the rock when you're stuck is damn fucking cute. Plus, you got half naked in front of me and you barely even knew me." He gave me a sly wink, he mouth tucked up to one side and his eyes bright..

"I _don't_ know you." I gasped. It was definitely _not_ the sun.

"There's time."


	17. Chapter 17

**Chalk:17**

The day I finally got my fingerprints on Edward was the same day we almost died.

Funny how the things you hope for never exactly happen the way you thought they would. There's no preparation involved, _ever_. No matter how many different scenarios you imagine, life will just never throw you the ball the way you expected it to. In this particular instance, the ball was a rock and I shuddered to think about what would have happened if fate had lobbed it at us any harder.

We weren't at our typical boulder field that day. Jasper had drug us along to another spot that was easily an hour's drive out of town and then another hour's walk to the rock. When the boys joked that they really just took climbing breaks on their hikes, they weren't joking. A large portion of our time was spent hauling all of our gear to a problem, working on it for a while, and then moving to the next one. The boys were each shouldering a crash pad which left me with our backpack, heavy with water bottles and shoes and food. By the time we finally reached our destination I was exhausted, flopping down on the pads at the base of Jasper's new project, gulping air like I was a fish out of water.

The rock here looked different, rough and grainy compared to the soft stone I was used to. The pads of my fingers tingled just looking at it, which didn't really matter much because the boys weren't letting me climb today anyway. It had been almost three weeks since Edward smashed my hand and while it looked a lot better from the outside, it still hurt from deep within all the muscles and tiny bones. I still slept with an ice pack in bed, cooling my hand to fall asleep and usually woke up with an ice cold bag of water against my stomach. I'd expected as much from Edward, but even Jasper took his side as he examined my hand, turning it over in his as we stood next to the car, preparing to leave.

"You gotta give yourself time, Sparkles. No use in fucking up your hand this early in the game." He scolded softly, and I saw Edward smirk over his shoulder at me, right again. I grumbled under my breath and pulled my own climbing shoes from the backpack, tossing them into the backseat and slamming the door behind them in annoyance.

Jasper called this climb The Delicate Place, an apt name for the complex series of holds that scattered themselves to the top. It wasn't a tall problem, but one that had you scrambling all over the face of the boulder, from side to side, up and down, before you could finally ascent. Jasper sat and stared at the rock face while Edward laced up his shoes.

"You first." He said to Edward, who clapped his hands together in a white cloud of dust, t-shirt discarded and his hair a manic mess.

"It's your project." Edward shook his head but Jasper quirked an eyebrow at him.

"I'd like to see how you fair, first. I think I've got it all wrong."

Jasper and I stood beside Edward as he lay down on the pad, the under-hang he had to traverse just to get to the face of the boulder shading him from the sun. He spent a while fingering the rock, his face serious before he settled on his holds, testing his grip and placing his feet before he pulled himself off the mat. I watched the muscles in his arms flex and strain under the tension, his abs curled into knots as he pulled himself along the carved out bottom of the boulder.

It took only seconds before he was pulling his body vertical, placing his hands sure and soft before him. When he got to the middle of the boulder he paused, wedging his toe and then his knee into divots in the rock and then slowly pulling both of his hands away from the stone. I gulped down my heart, my hand racing up to brace him before I even thought about doing it, terrified that he was going to fall backward.

"Stay back, Sparkles." He warned me without even turning to look down.

Jasper grinned at me from the corner of my vision, tucking his head to talk low in my ear. "That's called a knee-bar. Using your legs to brace yourself, if you do it right you can give your arms a break. He has to dyno this next one and it's best to be prepared for that sort of thing."

We watched from below as Edward reached both hands behind himself and tucked his fingers into the chalk-bag tied to his waist. It was settled perfectly between the two dimples at the base of his spine, all the tiny muscles that held his ribs together flexing with the movement and I tried to suppress a feeling of dread that was rising in my stomach.

"Dyno?" I stuttered.

"He's going to have to jump for it." Jasper pointed to a hold that seemed impossibly far away, a crease in the rock that looked too small, even for my own hands. Edward clapped his hands together in another puff of white and before I could even formulate my concerns to voice them, he threw himself at the hold much like he'd thrown himself from my porch.

Launched his body forward from his feet without any warning and somehow, _magically_, reached that barely-there hold.

Jasper yowled and threw a fist in the air, cajoling Edward on and I wondered if this was as far as Jasper had ever made it on this particular problem. If he'd never been able to complete the'dyno' to that hold and had fallen every time instead. It scared me to think of it, him out here alone and plummeting from that spot because Edward was at least six feet off the ground.

He made it two more holds before he had to campus around a sharp lip of rock and drop down to the level of my head in order to secure his foot into the next hold. It was almost as if he'd gotten the beta on this problem before he'd even seen it, but they hadn't talked at all about it on the way here at all. He seemed acutely aware of the rock, privy to its secrets and if you asked me, it almost seemed as though they were having a secret conversation, his face just inches away from the stone.

Before long, he'd danced around nearly half of the gigantic rock without so much as a falter along the way. Jasper was getting more and more excited with every move and we drug the pads around as Edward edged on, the climb eventually sending him upward toward the top lip of the rock. They called this the '_mantle_,' a jutting edge that was nearly impossible to pull yourself over gracefully. The only one I'd ever encountered, I'd ended up shimmying over on my belly like a floppy worm.

I'd seen Edward grab that lip of stone and pull himself over in one fluid movement. I guess it came with practice.

"Send it!" Jasper called out encouragement, another one of the terms they used often enough that I'd figured it out on my own. To 'send' was something akin to slam dunking a basket ball. While it could mean something as simple as completing a problem, they often used it as something like a pep-rally. Spurring their friend on with a hollered goal. Edward grunted in response and stretched his hands above him, wrapping his fingers around that very last obstacle of stone and that's when I noticed them.

Four little dots of white just across the top of his hip bone.

There was another one a little ways down where my thumb had pressed against the skin right there above his shorts. The evidence was faint and dry, just the very tips of my fingerprints left behind and I was focused so intently on the way they were shifting over his muscles as he moved that I wasn't really aware of the moment everything went to shit.

In slow motion.

I heard Edward yell something and looked up just in time to see the already falling rock, Edward falling with it, and I was in the way.


	18. Chapter 18

**Chalk:18**

Before I knew what had happened I was flat on my back in the dust, the rock tumbling into the base of a gnarled tree beside me with a thud that shook the earth beneath my head. I could hear faint cursing, but only barely because my ears were ringing and my vision was wobbly and my hand still hurt, but now my arm hurt and my ankle hurt as well.

Edward's face, obscured in falling hair was suddenly fish-eyed in my view.

"Are you ok?" He asked, hastily checking me for blood. Jasper's face appeared above Edward's, peering down at me and they both looked a little ashen. I coughed, my lungs coated in a fine sheen of dust and struggled to sit up past Edward's protests.

"I'm fine." I pushed his hands away and closed my eyes against the spin until my head righted itself. My ankle was fucking throbbing, and my arm was on fire. I gulped before I blinked my eyes open and found Edward less than a foot away, gripping his fists together and staring at me intently. He sighed heavily before exchanging a look with Jasper and before I knew what was going on, they were packing up.

"We don't have to leave," I told them.

They both looked at me like I was insane and continued on without responding.

Edward carried me the entire way back to the car, absolutely refusing to let me walk and getting more and more mad at me every second I fought him on it. He'd eventually threatened to knock me over the head and do it without my permission unless I complied and I gave in under his piercing stare. Jasper shouldered all of the gear himself and followed us down the mountain, the sun starting to sink and the sky going pastel. I rested my head against Edward's chest, his heart thumping agitatedly beneath my ear all the way back to the car.

The drive home was silent.

I'm sure we were all thinking the worst, the could-have's that only ever amounted to something terrible. That rock _could have_ easily crushed one of us, _could have_ left us for dead. I curled up in the back on top of one of the crash pads and dug a sweatshirt out of the jumble of gear and clothing to go fetal in. It was big enough for me to pull my knees up inside and even though it really hurt my ankle, the fabric smelled so much like Edward that it sort of distracted me from the pain.

I lay there the entire drive home, watching the boy's faces in the fleeting flashes of headlights. Edward looked furious, a scrape still bleeding down his temple from falling shrapnel that he wouldn't let me clean up. Jasper was staring out the window, his face hollowed out and even though he hadn't been hurt, I thought that maybe he had it the worst of all, having witnessed the action in every agonizing detail.

Suspended in a few bottomless moments of fear that he might loose one, or both of us.

We dropped him off in front of his house and watched him lope inside with his head hung. Edward drove to my house in silence and I didn't move, still tucked up into his sweatshirt and full of unanswered panic. I stumbled from the car and he watched me take four limping steps toward my front door before I felt him rush up behind me and scoop me into the air.

I stared at the pulse beating underneath his ear as he carried me inside and set me on my feet the moment we were in the door. I tottered on my aching ankle, slumping against the door to keep my balance as he strode into the hallway.

"You should have let me fall." I'd heard that statement from him before. He paced in front of me, half-naked and agitated, his hands leaving traces of chalk everywhere he touched. His arms and face, his hair, dusted in white. He looked ashen even underneath the powder and mad enough to crush a stone in his bare fists.

"I was trying to spot you. I-"

"No!" He bellowed, rounding on me with his breath caught in his chest and his face livid. "I told that you'd only get hurt! I _told_ you to stay back. You should have listened to me!"

"Why are you yelling?" I shuffled my feet to get the weight off my leg and tried to hide the bruise on my arm between my body and the door.

"Because I feel fucking responsible for you!" He launched his words at me like grenades, flaming red around the edges and breathing heavily.

"Why? Because I'm your _Gabby_?" I shot back at him and knew instantly that it was the wrong thing to say. His face hardened a million eons worth and he looked as ancient and imposing as some of those rocks we climbed together.

"No. It's not that," he snapped, jaw tight. "I don't want to call you that anymore. I don't want _anyone_ to call you that."

He took four fast steps toward me, closing the space between us down to mere inches and I gripped the doorknob behind my back to keep myself up right. My hand screamed in protest, still sore and achy by the end of the day no matter what I did, but I just gripped tighter. Set my toes back down on the tile and pressed them down hard enough to send a bolt of liquid fire clear to my hip.

Maybe the pain would keep my head on straight.

"That's why you call me Sparkles." I huffed, trying not to bely the inner agony I was subjecting myself to.

"I don't want to call you that anymore, either."

"Then what _do_ you want to call me?" I thought that he'd maybe come up with that nickname he'd been working on which was unfair because I hadn't even started thinking about his. He shook his head slightly from side to side, awestruck and determined, swallowing around something in his throat.

"Girl."

"_That's_ the best you could come up with? _Girl_? Not very creative, Edward." I rolled my eyes at him, mostly to break our gaze because it felt like he was burning holes in my skin.

"Not just _girl_. _My_ girl." He exhaled his words as he put a hand on my hip, fingers digging into my skin to pull me away from the door and into him. Our hips met and I went weak-kneed.

"Yours?"

"Yeah. If you'll let me."

_Fuck it._ I released the doorknob and pressed up on my toes, my ankle flaming acid pain up my leg and flung my arms around his neck to steady myself. He seemed to sense my unease and wrapped his arms around my waist, lifting me up until my toes just barely brushed the carpet before he kissed me.

_Jesusgod_, remember when I was saying that nothing is ever like you expect it to be and that life will always, _always_ surprise you? Let's add this moment to statement as a prime example, shall we? _Far_ too good to be true, as though I was living life through a rose-colored lens and had stumbled blindly across some boy with a body to die for, magical fingers, and apparently that trait graced his mouth as well.

He pressed against me, opened mouthed and damp before swiping his tongue across my lower lip and capturing it in between his. He dug his fingers into my thighs and picked me clear up off the ground, wrapping my legs around his waist before returning his grip to my ass. I sighed when I settled against him, hating his sweatshirt I was still sporting for getting in the way of all the bare skin he had on display. He kissed my lips again before dragging his mouth along my jaw and licking the soft spot below my ear. I'm sure my pulse was hammering underneath him.

"Ok." I panted, palms pressed to his back.

"Ok, what?" He spoke against my neck, his tongue and teeth to my skin and his dusty smell clouding my head.

"Ok, but you can't _ever_ call me Sparkles again."

Edward groaned and pressed closer, his thumbs sinking below the elastic waist of my leggings. I sunk my fingers into the hair at the base of his scalp in response, gripping his face to try to pull him back to my mouth.

"_Ah_." He winced, pulling away, my thumb smeared with a faint trace of red from the drip-dry blood meandering down his temple. He looked at my thumb skeptically for a moment and readjusted his grip on my ass, eyes pulling far enough away that I knew he was back at the boulder, falling rock and all even though he really only had me pinned to my front door.

"Just fucking listen to me next time, ok Sparkles?" He sighed gently, his face strained.

"Hey, you-"

"Last time. I promise."


	19. Chapter 19

**Chalk:19**

We ended up in the shower, all of the dirt and dust and chalk and fear from the day washing down the drain. It was kind of fitting and I wondered if he knew we needed it, walking us silently to my bedroom with our lips still locked and my legs around his waist. I never wanted to do anything ever again except kiss Edward, the high I was getting from it zinging through me like a taser, burning off all my nerve endings and leaving me feeling numb and fuzzy.

I still had no recollection of exactly how it had happened, but that rock had beaten the shit out of us. Edward had a huge bruise blooming on his shoulder, another on his hip and I had a one on my forearm that looked like a flower with a deep angry, red center and purple petals. It wasn't exactly my ankle that had been hit as I'd thought, but my calf that had taken the brunt of the rock, the back of my leg another bursting bloom of color. Add those bruises to the colorful display of scrapes and bumps and gnarled fingers, and I was a sight to behold.

I peeled myself carefully out of my clothes once I'd peeled myself off his face, sore and exhausted even though it wasn't due to any exertion today. I hadn't climbed at all, and I'd barely _walked_. I hobbled into the shower and Edward followed, the steam swallowing us in seconds.

He didn't try to kiss me under the water like I thought he might. Instead, he washed me thoughtfully, nonchalant and intent, as though his erection wasn't pressing against my thigh. He leaned against the shower wall and watched me wash my hair, his arms crossed over his stomach and the steam obscuring his face before pulling me close again. We stood under the hot water for a while together, my face pressed to his chest, letting the hot water relax all those tightly coiled muscles and I was glad to hear that his heart had resumed it normal plodding beat rather than the frantic hummingbird I'd listened to the entire way back to the car.

He made my sugary lilac colored towels look completely indecent, tucked tight in around his waist and doing absolutely _nothing_ to disguise _anything_. He plucked me from the bathtub before I'd even gotten my towel secured around myself and sat me on the countertop to rub more of his all-purpose green goop on my bruises. His fingers were soft and warm and he massaged the spot on my arm and the muscles of my hand with his magical-goo, standing between my legs. When he moved onto my leg he finally let me wash the blood off his face, dabbing at him with a damp washcloth. The cuts were actually quite small once all the blood was gone and I dipped my finger into the jar, smearing the salve across them gently.

He deserved a little of his own medicine.

I pushed on his shoulders, tugging him around so that I could get a good look at the bruise on his shoulder. It was enormous, stretching from the tip of his shoulder to the middle of his back, an angry mottled mar across his skin. I tucked my fingers into the magical goo and rubbed it soft but gentle into the bruise, amazed at the variety of color that was springing up just under his skin.

Purple and green. Yellow and scarlet.

While I rubbed, I took the opportunity to admire.

There was muscle everywhere I looked.

I didn't even know half of them even _existed_. One solid bunch of them anchored at the base of his skull and splayed down his neck, anchoring to his shoulder blade. Small sets knit together his ribs and others curled across his torso to root in at his abdomen. I paid some attention to the bruise on his hip, more magical goo and soft rubbing. This one wasn't as large as the one on his shoulder but was stained an angry eggplant color in the center, right over the crest of his bone. He winced when I touched it, yelping as he jumped away and looked at me accusingly before examining the damage himself.

"Damn." He muttered, poking at the discoloration with his fingers. When he looked at me still sitting in my towel on the edge of the vanity, his mouth mashed up to the side as though he was biting the inside of his mouth.

"I'm gonna go, I guess. Can I call you tomorrow?" It was endearing how he asked the question, as though we hadn't just had a conversation about our relationship less than an hour ago and I was pretty certain that boys called their '_girls_' whenever they wanted to. His hair was darkened from the water, eyes bright from the steam and I knew I'd spend the entire night alone in bed having nightmares about that rock if he left now.

"_Don't_." I blurted, catching myself only after it was out of my mouth and tried to cover what sounded like desperation with a healthy coat of justification. "I mean . . . you don't _have_ to go."

_Lame_.

He gazed at me thoughtfully for a moment before his mouth widened as though he'd just seen right into my head.

"Today was a little scary, huh?" He totally had me pegged.

"Well, _yeah_. It didn't scare you?" I was shocked, gripping the edge of the vanity in my aching hands. Edward shrugged and I tried not to stare at the curling trail of hair that was disappearing into his towel.

"It's happened to me before. This time was . . . _different_, though." He eyed me carefully and I slid to my toes, dripping water from my hair. I was barely tall enough to see over his shoulder and found myself staring at the two bumps where his collar bones met up.

"Stay. Please."

His adam's apple bobbed and it took an entire minute, I know because I counted each one of my bated breaths before he nodded his head with an exhale.

I managed to pull on a t-shirt and some underwear, crawling into bed to the sound of Edward rummaging around in the kitchen. I thought he was trying to feed himself but he returned with a few lumpy packages wrapped up in dishtowels, dumping them on the foot of the bed and holding one out to me. I took it from him, lifting the fabric away to reveal a bag of frozen peas.

"Thanks, but I really prefer mine cooked." I tried to hand it back to him and he grinned at me.

"Ice pack. That leg of yours is gonna be hurting tomorrow."

He winced as he climbed across the bed, a sound low in his throat and his fingertips hovering off the blanket. When he fell to his side next to me, his body stretching warm and damp all along mine, he rolled me onto my stomach and situated the bag of peas on top of my new bruise that graced the back of my leg. It hurt for a moment until the chill seeped in between the muscles and I sighed into the pillow I had bunched up underneath my chest. I watched Edward position an ice pack that looked like frozen corn underneath his shoulder before he lay back on it. There was something to be said for the vegetables, they molded themselves the contours of my bruise as though they were hugging me.

"The peas were kind of a stroke of genius." I told him, watching as he settled the last pack across the bruise on his hip.

"Jasper, he's full of those."

I picked up his hand that was nearest to me and pulled it toward my face to inspect it. I was used to how terrible my fingers looked after a shower, the pruning of my skin making them look a million times worse that they actually were but Edward's looked as though they were about to fall off. Cratered clear through several layers, his calluses gone that milky white color that water gave to skin when it was water-logged. It almost seemed as though he'd dipped his fingers a bowl of acid, letting the chemical ravage his skin until there was nothing but that smooth stuff that's left behind after a burn. No _wonder_ it looked as though it hurt when he touched them to anything, even the soft chenille blanket I had thrown across the bed. It was the first time I'd gotten a chance to really look at his hands and it took me about two seconds to come to the conclusion that he could probably rob a bank and not leave a single fingerprint behind.

"You could rob a bank if you wanted to." I rubbed my thumb softly across the bumps at the base of his fingers, the skin built up and rubbed off so many times it was smooth as silk.

"Hardly." He chuckled, letting me manipulate his hand in front of my face, eyes twitching in the corners when I touched the pads of his pitted fingertips. "I doubt I'd be able to hold onto anything right now."

_Bummer._


	20. Chapter 20

**Chalk: 20**

Alice's house was dark the next morning. Usually it was her at my back door telling me that I was late, but this morning it was me in her place, on her porch with my coffee cup wondering why the fuck she wasn't answering the door.

Edward was still passed out on my bed, on his mouth open slightly and his limbs sprawled long and lean across the baby blue blanket. I'd woken with my cheek plastered to his chest, having fallen asleep on top of him last night and my leg was throbbing dully. I'd picked myself off him and made coffee as quietly as possible even though it barely mattered because I dropped a mug on the floor anyway, shattering it into a million pieces.

He didn't even twitch.

I doctored my coffee and went in search of Alice, needing to unload about last night's epic yet sexually frustrating awesomeness. We tried to make out some more, but every attempt ended in painful failure. Edward pressed his toes does on my leg hard enough to make my eyes tear up and I wedged my knee against his hip somehow when I abandoned my peas and tried to climb on top of him. He tossed me off and rolled against the mattress, groaning in pain into the covers and staying there for a long time after his breathing had calmed.

I hoped my sheets smelled ok.

She wasn't there and I sat in her cushioned patio furniture to call her from my cell phone, clutching my coffee cup and watching everything lighten around me. If my yard was the quiet forest glade, Alice's belonged to the slightly schizophrenic, distracted neighbor. There were plants in every shape, size, color and height, strange sculptures and weaving stone pathways set in intricate twisting circles around her yard.

"Where are you?" I nagged when she answered, sounding like a mom and hating every second of it.

"Jasper's."

"Jasper's?" I asked, feeling confused even though it made sense. "Why?"

"Well, I don't know Bella" Alice huffed into my ear." _Apparently_ you and Edward almost died yesterday and he seems a little freaked out about it. He says that rock came within inches of Edward's head."

"It did?" I let the panic well up in me again, choking me.

"I guess so. Are _you_ ok?" From the way she asked, I knew that she thought I was much worse off than I was. I wondered how far the backlash had warped Jasper's vision of the moment, sending us hurtling in entirely new directions, violent and raw with every recalled memory.

"My leg is sore. Edward's bruised up, but we're fine."

"He's there."

I rolled me eyes. Of course she knew. "Yes."

"We'll be over soon. We need to talk."

* * *

Alice took one look at my leg and gasped in horror. Edward's bruised shoulder got an entire slap out of her, inflicted on his uninjured side out of mercy. She slapped Jasper for good measure and glared at me.

"What would happen if you were out there, god knows fucking _where_, and you got pinned under a rock?" She hissed.

"That wouldn't happen." Edward growled and all three of us turned to look at him. He'd shrugged back into his shirt and still looked deliciously sleep rumpled. He was scowling at Alice.

"You don't know that," she retorted stubbornly.

"We'd move the rock. She's never out there alone."

"There are rocks even you can't move, Edward."


	21. Chapter 21

**Chalk:21**

Edward showed up two days later, asking me on a date from the front doorstep with a limp flower in his hand. It drooped against his knuckles and I leaned against the doorway in my bathrobe, propping up my sore leg. The bruises were only getting worse at this point, a splotchy blot of color across my pale skin. Edward looked no worse for wear, although his evidence was all covered up. He was in more of those cut off dress pants in a grayish-blue color hanging precariously off his hips and a light cotton dress shirt so thin it was practically see through.

"I know it's a little impromptu." He grinned at me.

"A little?" I fingered the wilted flower, picking the bud up between my fingers. It was a poppy, papery and burning red, the petals bruising at the slightest touch. I wondered if it was metaphorical, or a joke.

He ushered me inside and ordered me to get dressed, fixing breakfast and packing me up in record time. I tugged on an airy dress, grabbed my sandals and found a floppy hat just before he had his hand on the small of my back and was pushing me out the door to the car. This wasn't the vehicle I was used to being driven around in, lounging on the crash pads in the airy back of an old Land Rover while the boys talked over the wind up front. This car was the one I'd seen him with the first time, a low sleek silver object with dark leather interiors and squashy seats.

He took us into the mountains, climbing a tall pass before turning off on a tiny paved road, twisting through the trees and around craggy spots of rock. It was sort of like a video game from inside the car, the road a novelty and the vehicle a toy. Edward seemed to be enjoying himself, the engine snarling under his foot and his hand forever palming the gear shift.

"How many miles to the gallon does this thing get?" I hollered over the wind and the engine and saw the corner of his mouth pick up.

"Eight."

"Eight!" I screeched, trying to control my wind-blown hair. "That's worse than my truck!"

"It's worse than most vehicles." He snorted and shifted gears with a loud ripping noise around a sharp curve.

"Yeah, but my truck has at least fifty _years_ on this car. You would have thought they'd have gotten more efficient by now."

"Honey, this car isn't built for efficiency." He glanced over at me, his eyes like emeralds and his hair standing off his forehead. I had to dig my fingers into my thighs to keep myself from staring aimlessly back at him, his newest moniker striking me dumb and stumbling.

"What's it built for then?" I coughed.

"Speed."

* * *

We came to a dusted, cloudy halt at the end of the road, the car skidding across the gravel when Edward stomped his foot down on the brakes. He wasn't lying about the speed factor, having raced that little car up into the clouds in record time. We were high up in the mountains, the earth flopped out before us, far away craggy cliffs signaling our normal outdoor destination. It was strange to say, but I sort of missed climbing, the three long weeks since I hurt my hand seeming endless and bland.

"This is beautiful." I sighed as I stepped out of the car and

"It gets better." Edward appeared beside me and pointed to a towering platform high above our heads, standing tall on four enormous legs crosshatched with support beams. The wood was peeling and dusty and the platform loomed above us, casting a dark shadow on the ground. I hadn't even noticed it until Edward pointed it out, too awestruck by the vista before us to notice what was going on above my head.

We stood at the bottom, both of us craned at the neck to look up.

"What is it?"

"A fire tower. You can see for miles."

"Understatement." I laughed and tested the metal ladder that stretched up to a distant hole in the platform at least fifty feet above my head. While I was getting better at stomaching my nausea when I got to the top of a rock, this was higher than I'd ever climbed before and it had me a little dizzy already.

"You first." Edward smirked at me, motioning to the ladder I was gripping for dear life.

"No way." I shook my head. "You have to go up first."

"We've had this conversation. You can't spot me, I'd at least like to spot you."

"You're going to look up my dress." I clutched the wispy hem brushing my thighs, suddenly very aware that I'd put on a pair of underwear this morning that were almost as good as see through, lacy and meshed in all the wrong places for this.

Edward chuckled. "Well, I can't say that I won't. But I'll try not to, if that's what you want."

I scampered up the ladder in record time, fully aware of his eyes glued to my ass in its not-so-decent covering and my heart hammering its way clear up into my throat before I reached the hole. I flopped onto the wood, breathing heavily and waited for him, a shadow across my face alerting me to his arrival.

"Nicely done." He offered me a hand and pulled me to my feet.

There was a tiny room on top of the platform, barely bigger than my living room with glass windows and a little slanted roof. A peek through the glass showed a small studio apartment, a miniscule kitchen and a hodgepodge of mismatched furniture. There was a little bed shoved up under one window and an afghan that looked exactly like the one my grandmother had thrown over the back of her couch draped across the foot of the mattress.

I wanted to move in immediately.

We sat on the platform with our legs dangling over the side, the support railing pressed to our chests and watched the shadows cast from clouds crawl their way laboriously along the ground. They bathed spots of earth in shaded darkness before moving on, pulling themselves along like giant whales.

Edward was examining his fingers intently, brushing his thumb across the worn-down prints with a pained look on his face. When he noticed me watching him rather than the scenery, he shrugged at me.

"I have to play tonight. I have the feeling it's going to be painful."

"Play what?"

"The piano."

"Really?" That surprised me, I had to admit. Rough rock and smooth piano ivories seemed like two opposite ends of the spectrum. "What do you play?"

"Concert, mostly. But I give lessons at an after school program most of the year, too."

"With _these_ fingers?" I touched my hand to his but instead of letting me rub the pads of his fingers, he gripped my hand tightly in his. The sandpapery feel of his peeling calluses passed steadily across the back of my hand.

"Yeah. Although I won't say that I haven't finished a performance and wanted nothing more than to cut them all off. The demanding pieces can get . . . painful." Edward opened his mouth as though he had more to say, but it took him a full minute to speak again, gripping my hand tight enough to make it ache. "That's sort of what this was all about, really. I was hoping you'd come listen tonight."

Funny how he asked me to come _listen_, rather than _watch_.

"It wasn't all about standing at the bottom of the ladder and watching me climb up it, huh?" I teased and even though his neck reddened, he broke out in a sly smirk that did nothing for his innocence act.

"I'm not gonna lie. Those thirty-seconds would have made the entire day worth it."


	22. Chapter 22

**PreAN: **I promised a lemon and the time is now. If you want to skip it, sure (_I guess_) . . . just stop reading after they make it the car. I suggest that you don't do that, though. ;)**  
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**Chalk:22**

I let Alice dress me up for my date with Edward and regretted it the moment I pulled her selection over my head. She called it a bandage dress which was _not_ a lie because the thing was so tight I felt sucked in to a mere inch of my life. I'd never seen that sort of curve come out in my body, the dress hugging every inch of skin and exposing a whole lot more of them. The color was decent, a deep blue that made my skin look pale despite my sort-of tan, but the neckline was not decent _at all_.

Scooped low and scalloped just enough to hide my nipples. At the very least.

"Alice, I can't wear this." I shuffled out of her bathroom, trying to figure out how to walk normally in something this tight. I knew it was possible, I'd seen it done by other girls a number of times but I was waddling along like I had my knees tied together, clutching my boobs to keep them in the dress.

"Yes, you can. And you can also wear these." She held up a pair of silvery heels that were at least five inches tall and even _looked_ dangerous.

"No. I can't. And I _definitely_ can't wear shoes like that."

"You wear those horrid rubber things every day!" She barked at me, reminding me of my climbing shoes. She kind of had a point.

"Fine." I huffed, and she plopped the shoes into my waiting hands.

"Edward is going to shit when he sees you." She twittered as I balanced on her shoulder and pulled on the shoes, tottering to the mirror, wondering just who the fuck it was staring back at me through the glass. Certainly not me.

"Let's hope not."

Edward didn't shit himself, thank god, but I think I knocked him silly because he barely said a word until we were safely in the car. It took nearly twenty minutes to escape Alice who bustled around the living room snapping photos like we were going to prom rather than on a date.

Edward showed up in a tuxedo, so I blamed it on him.

Bow ties were not meant to look that sexy.

"You look unreal." He settled in the front seat after helping me into my own and came at me, lips and stubble and callused hands everywhere. I let him kiss me for a while until I noticed Alice standing out on the front lawn with a smile on her face and her camera in her hands. I pulled myself regretfully off Edward and he peeled away in a cloud of smoke.

He ushered me to a seat high up in a balcony, rather isolated from the rest of the theater and pressed a kiss to my mouth before disappearing. I lounged back in my chair, glad to be off my feet and admired the elaborately painted ceiling and molded sconces as the hall began to fill. The noise escalated, shrill happy voices wafting up toward me and I peered over the banister to find that almost every seat was filled with children. They were chirping amongst themselves, patting each other's faces and squealing with laughter. Many of them were wearing dark glasses and I wondered if this was some sort of 3D experience that Edward forgot to give me the proper equipment for.

When the room darkened and the noise from the crowd died down, a single spotlight flooded down on a far corner of the stage, Edward in his tuxedo with his shining copper hair seated in front a piano below it. I thought he'd be center stage, but when his fingers pealed out a single echoing note, a flurry of bright lights lit up the blackened backdrop of the stage in response.

A soft, summery green for a light, tripping sound.

The children below me started responding, many of them pointing to the light show on the stage, bright beams miming the sound in color. Edward started out soft and sweet, the stage lit up in greens and blues and purples. Starburst splotches of pink and sunbursts of yellow hinting at his highest notes. Twenty minutes in and he was pounding away on the keys, the flashes of color bursting into agitated reds and boiling orange. I thought about his fingers hammering against the piano and my own fingers tingled at the thought, remembering his admission that the difficult pieces were painful.

He got a standing ovation, a giant shield of laughter rising up to press against that painted ceiling. I joined in, clapping as hard as my hands would let me.

Edward showed up to collect me when all the children had drained from the theater, holding hands in pairs, some holding walking sticks and others speaking to each other with their hands. I picked myself up out of my seat and rushed toward him, catching him around the waist and choking on my newfound admiration.

"That was beautiful, Edward."

"Thank you. But I think the noise of the piano is second best to the noise those kids make." He chuckled and held my head to his chest.

"They're deaf?"

"Many of them. Some are blind. The seats on the floor level have acoustic sensors in the cushions so they can feel the vibrations. Interactive music. Just because you can't see or hear doesn't mean you can't experience it."

We intended to go to dinner, but didn't make it farther than the car. I only persuaded him to drive us home when a security guard paused a little too long to eye the license plate of the tiny silver car we were steaming up. We tumbled through my front door in a tangle of feet, Edward's fingers already under the hem of my dress.

"Take this wretched thing off." He mumbled, tugging it up my thighs and together we struggled to pull me out of it, reminding me a lot of when my feet would get stuck in my climbing shoes way back in the beginning. It slid stubbornly over my head and my lungs expanded for the fist time all night, my breasts suddenly freed and I stood in the hallway, naked, kicking off my shoes as Edward shrugged out of his jacket and ripped off his bow tie.

He flung it carelessly to the side, the string catching and dangling from a picture frame further down the hall.

"I spent _weeks_ fantasizing about what you looked like underneath all that clothing."

"It's not like I was ever wearing much." I shuffled my feet, trying not to feel nervous but it was impossible. He was unbuttoning his dress shirt slowly, eyeing me as though I was a complex climbing project he'd been working on for a very long time and intended to solve. Tonight.

"Always more than I hoped."

We didn't make it farther than the living room, getting distracted just like we had done in the car. Our feet, which we usually placed with such precision, tripped us up and we landed heavy on the carpet near the couch. Edward rose up on his arms above me, hair in his eyes and chest heaving. I'd bitten his lips red and plump and in the dark, he looked like he had gemstones buried behind his eyelids.

"I've wanted to do this since the day I fucking met you." He pressed down on top of me, rough carpet under my ass and tiny metal zipper-teeth digging into my thigh. His lips were everywhere and I wondered why it had taken us so long to do this,_ it felt so fucking good_. We'd spent months dancing around each other, dangling off rocks and then circling from a safe distance when we were forced back in the real world, but for some reason we'd never gotten _here_.

_Here_ being my floral patterned rug, drenched in silver moonlight and loving every painful rug-burned moment of it.

I fumbled for the waist of his dress pants, full length this time, and pushed them down over his hips. He groaned heavily into my neck, arms trembling for a split second of weakness before wrenching himself away to shimmy them off and kick them free. I sunk my fingernails into the soft skin at his hips and he paused, eyeing me carefully before he pulled a condom from his pocket.

"Is it fair to say that I hoped for this?" He questioned me, holding the foil up in the air between us and I couldn't help but smirk at him. _Of course it was fucking fair_. I didn't wear that damn dress for nothing.

"You wouldn't have been the only one." I clenched my fingers tighter into his skin, his hips jerking toward me reflexively. He rolled the condom on and pulled my hips toward him, kneecaps to my ass cheeks and my thighs on top of his. He gazed down at me, licking his bottom lip languidly and I squirmed, desperate for some friction.

My pussy was aching just as bad as my hand.

Edward placed his giant hand over my stomach, fingers on my rib cage and the heel of his palm so fucking close to where I needed it. His calluses scraped against me as he shifted and suddenly his thumb was sinking between my folds, searching for my clit and pressing insistently against it once it had been located. I gasped and tried to remember how you're supposed to inhale and exhale properly, reduced back to the basics in a single, split second.

"Oh, my . . ." I fumbled with my words, his thumb tracing a heavy fingered pattern around me and my skin broke out in a wash of acid flame.

He got me off once using nothing but his thumb and I think he did it just to watch it. I writhed and moaned my way through an orgasm that put stars behind my eyes and came-to in a rush of blinding light, Edward smiling and falling to his hands above me when I finally opened my eyes. He echoed almost the exact same words I'd said to him following his piano performance, full of awe and wonder as though he'd seen something mythical and earth-moving.

"That was _beautiful_, Bella. I want to make you do it again."

He pressed forward and sunk into me _so slow_ and not nearly slow enough, the moment over before it had even begun. He drew a heavy breath up against my neck, pressing himself deeper and exhaling, hot enough to make me break out in a dew of sweat. He pushed into me in shallow bursts, rocking his hips and I squirmed until I found that spot where his bones met up with my clit.

_Holy_.

"Shit." I gasped and arched my back, trying to get closer even though it barely seemed possible and Edward made a sound low in his chest, rock-bitten fingers deep in my skin. I planted my feet and ground down on to him, locking my arms against my headboard for leverage and enjoying myself thoroughly until I felt his fingers feather between us.

Devastating any amount of self control I was still in possession of.

He pulled me open as if to get a good look and thrust hard up into me the moment cool air hit my clit, more sounds rumbling up his throat. I rubbed myself on top of him, the look on his face full of astonished certainty, as though he was surprised he'd known the truth all along.

"Goddamn, Bella. That's gotta be the sexiest fucking thing I've ever seen."

I didn't know if he was talking about me, or him _in_ me, but I didn't really care either way. His words washed a blistering wave of heat through every single one of my cells, leaving me singed and teetering on the edge of something monumentally high and leaning precariously to the side. Another deep thrust and his fingers were back on my clit, rough and almost jagged against my sensitive skin, bordering up on a delicious sort of pain.

I toppled over like a penny off the Eiffel tower.

Hit the ground at warp speed and left an imprint of my face in the concrete.

A few more heavy thrusts and he was done, collapsing on top of me in a rush of air and weight, damp and warm and fucking gigantic.

"That was amazing. Painful, but amazing." Edward flopped down on the floor beside me, throwing off heat like a nuclear bomb and panting heavily. I snuggled up beside him, fingering the bruise on his hip. It looked terrible, so bad that I wondered if he maybe hadn't chipped the bone deep down in there.

I bet all that fantastic thrusting wasn't exactly pleasant.

* * *

**PostAN:** The outpouring of love has been incredible. Thank you to the ladies at **Edwardville** and the **Fictionators** and my darling **reds_red** (who pimps me out like the end of the world is upon us.) You all deserve cookies and parades.

**PostAN2:** The end is looming. Say your piece now.

Oh! And **ysar made me a friggen BEAUTIFUL banner** that I've been staring at for hours. Find the link in my profile.


	23. Chapter 23

**Chalk:23**

My first day back on a rock was also our last outdoor climb of the year.

I woke the next morning to a flurry of snow, the mild days of fall gone in a pure white instant and knew that it was over. Wet rock was impossible to climb and Edward had been warning me for weeks that the season was almost to a close. I begged him to take me out one last time, using my body and mouth to my advantage and had him relenting in seconds.

This was a newly acquired skill.

Even though we hadn't climbed at all in almost two months, we'd been keeping each other occupied. Most of that was with our tongues, but we'd tried to branch out a little in the last few weeks and I'd been accompanying Edward and Jasper to the rock gym as a spectator. Jasper only joined us only when we could pry him off Alice. It was a task that got harder and harder to do as the weeks passed, the two of them finding a comfortable middle ground between high fashion and desert rat that seemed implausible.

The gym had nothing on the real thing, dusty and smelly and congested with people and stagnant air, but the boys bared their teeth and soon enough had just about every other climber off the wall, watching them instead. They moved with a skilled ease that I couldn't spot in anyone else and were both sort of awe-inspiring to watch, maybe especially for the experienced climbers. Edward stood beside me one afternoon, a crowd gathered around us as we watched Jasper dance all over the wall as though he was completing a giant connect-the-dots puzzle. I understood by now that there were specific routes on the giant, jumbled wall, each color indicating a specific climb to follow.

Jasper was disregarding all of this, swirling around the entire face rather than belittle himself with the rather mundane problems.

They had a grudge against gym climbers. Gym climbers were _soft_, exhibitionists who couldn't exist out in the real world because mother nature doesn't map our her routes with neon-colored polyurethane holds. Her problems were far more subtle, intricate series of steps that required observation and strength that the gyms forever tried to imitate, but could never parallel. Gym climbers found themselves '_thretching_' up a boulder problem as though they'd never climbed before, no matter how revered they were under the cover of a roof. They hated going there and I think they only did it to show off and retain some muscle strength, only caving under duress or freak weather.

Such as winter.

Which was fast upon us.

We headed back to our boulder field that last day, the green of summer faded out to brown and grey, grass hard and crunchy beneath our feet. Edward marched ahead with two crash pads on his back which I thought was a little unnecessary at first, but the memory of our last climb here stopped me from saying anything.

Another crash pad certainly would hurt.

He took me back to my very first problem, that boulder tucked way back at the farthest end of the trail. I tried not to smile at him when we stopped beneath it, but totally failed. He grinned back and dropped the pads to the dirt, busying himself with refilling his chalk bag, billowing clouds of white powder lofting into the air and catching ahold of every ounce of sunbeam streaming through the trees. It dusted his hair with a shimmery halo of white and settled in his eyelashes.

"What is this one called, anyway? I asked as I was lacing up my shoes, my feet sliding easily inside now that the rubber was beginning to contour to my feet and I knew how to pull them on without dislocating my ankle. I'd been on so many climbs, had watched him climb a million others, all with the strangest of names and was rather perplexed that I hadn't bothered to learn the name of my very first climb.

"The Problem Queen." Edward flashed me that killer smiled before he pulled his shirt over his head, discarding it on top of a nearby rock and tensing every one of those muscles. "That's how I knew you were special."

He winked at me and leapt for the rock, prancing up it in seconds and waiting for me at the top. I took more time, adjusting to the dull ache in my hand that I had the feeling would stick around for a while. Edward had me training with rice, placing two deep bowls of it in front of me and instructing me to sink my hands in up to the wrist and move them through the rice in a couple of different patterns. I had no idea how it was supposed to help until five minutes later when all the muscles clear up to my shoulder were _aching_ from the simple exertion. I was glad he'd made me do it so much in my off time because this would have been impossible otherwise, my muscles feeling weak and unused as it was. It was only five holds but it took me forever, even once the ache had died away and I got that flush of adrenaline which reminded me why I liked doing this in the first place.

I gritted my teeth and sunk my softened fingers into the stone, pulling myself to the top out of force of will alone.

Edward offered a hand and pulled me to my feet on top of the rock, putting his hand on my neck to kiss me solidly. Part of me knew he was doing it to distract me from the dizzying fall to the ground that was sloshing through my stomach. Part of me didn't rightly care and I kissed him back, still buzzing on an adrenaline high.

"Thanks. I needed that." I panted against his mouth when he pulled away to smile at me, talking about the kiss _and_ the climb.

"I figured your first time back on that hand should be on something easy."

"You didn't pick it to be metaphorical? Or, did you do it to relive the glory of finding yourself a Gabby, struggling up a rock?"

Edward smiled sideways at me, pulling me in for one of those soft, sweet kisses he seemed to like so much. We stood on top of the boulder, feet encased in ugly shoes, arms and hands leaving faint chalk imprints everywhere we touched each other and our bruises finally fading away. He sighed into my mouth, speaking against my lips.

"No. To relive the glory of finding myself a _Girl_, struggling up a rock."

**The End. **

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**That's all she wrote folks.**

Thank you so much for all the giggly support, you've made me smile, tear up and laugh out loud. There might be an outtake on the way, although I promise nothing.

* * *

**In the meantime:** I have a, uhm . . . blog? I dunno, but it's pretty and almost complete and every chapter comes with picture-porn to drool over. Omnonom.

Link is in my profile. See you there!


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